Search results for

In February, the Singapore government unveiled its budget for 1998. Highlights of the budget for businesses include:

Japan’s legal system has a range of alternatives for insolvency proceedings. Bankruptcy is by far the most common. By Naoaki Eguchi and Yoshiaki Muto of Tokyo Aoyama Law Office and Jeremy Pitts of Baker & McKenzie, Toyko

Creditors and shareholders of insolvent Korean companies have three main attractive systems to protect their interests. The courts are showing increasing flexibility. By YS Oh and Keun Byung Lee of Bae, Kim & Lee, Korea

The crisis in Asia has boosted the existing dangers of failures in project finance transactions. This article outlines the ways to find a solution to failures. By Troy Alexander of White & Case LLP, New York

US firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom is advising Alltel Corporation in its bid for 360 Communications. Chicago firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal is counsel to 360 Communications. The proposed acquisition includes a stock swap, valued at US$4 billion, and the assumption of 360 Communications's US$1.8 billion debt. The companies have reached an accord on the merger and it has been approved by both boards.

Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE), the French utilities conglomerate, is to acquire the French media group Havas, in a Ffr40 billion (US$6.5 billion) deal. CGE was already, since last year, the dominant shareholder in the media group. Jean-François Prat, name partner at Bredin Prat, Paris, advises CGE.

After US software company Computer Associates International's negotiations failed to persuade rival Computer Sciences to agree to a negotiated merger, it launched a hostile bid at a lower price of US$108 per share on February 17. It also began legal action designed to force Computer Sciences, which has a poison pill defence, to allow its shareholders to vote on the offer. One week later, Computer Sciences filed a lawsuit against Computer Associates, alleging it used illegal bullying tactics to force the company to accept its bid. It is seeking an injunction against the bid and damages to compensate it for the US$50 million-worth of business it says it has lost as a result of the bid.

In a landmark judgment of the Texas Supreme Court, a partner at a Houston firm has lost her unfair dismissal case after she was sacked for querying a colleague's bills. Critics of the decision fear the ruling could discourage lawyers from fulfilling their ethical obligations. Houston firm Butler & Binion fired Colette Bohatch after she became concerned about fees charged to a client, Pennzoil, by John McDonald, the managing partner of the Washington office. Bohatch copied portions of McDonald's time diary and asked the firm's managing partner to investigate. The next day McDonald told Bohatch that Pennzoil was dissatisfied with her work. An internal investigation into Bohatch's complaints was carried out but no evidence of wrongdoing was found. Bohatch was advised to find another job and was told to leave the offices a year later.

Partners at UK law firm Wilde Sapte have voted to join the Arthur Andersen legal network. A heads of agreement document will be signed by early April. In London, Wilde Sapte will merge with Garretts, Andersen's existing UK firm. Andersen has been searching for a partner in the UK to bolster Garretts, and is understood to have approached other UK firms including Simmons & Simmons and Lovell White Durrant. It is likely Wilde Sapte's foreign offices will merge with Andersen's global network (which includes some 950 non-tax lawyers; see International Financial Law Review November 1997, page 25), although there is doubt over the future of the firm's Paris office. The managing partner of Wilde Sapte's office in France, Thomas McDonald, left SG Archibald in protest when it linked with Andersen. McDonald declines to comment.

UK firm Cameron McKenna is to incorporate US firm Faegre & Benson's Almaty team into its Kazakstan office. Cameron McKenna adds Faegre's resident partner, Thomas Johnson, and three local Kazak lawyers to its Almaty office, which will now have a total of eight lawyers. This is a further rationalization of the Kazakstan legal market following the merger of Pepper Hamilton & Scheetz's Almaty office with Coudert Brothers (see International Financial Law Review, March 1998, page 4). Faegre & Benson has decided to withdraw from central Asia. James Stephenson, a partner in Minneapolis, says that opening a Kazakstan office in 1992 was based on one particular project. The firm maintained a presence in Almaty but did not have long term objectives in the region. "We reached a point where we needed to invest additional resources in order to capitalize on the office's success," he says. "It is our only office in the region and it simply didn't fit into our strategy." Stephenson says the firm's international practice will concentrate on serving US clients in Europe. Faegre & Benson has an office in Frankfurt and formed an association with UK firm Hobson Audley Hopkins & Wood in August 1997.