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Law 8/1987 of June 8 regulating pension funds (Planes y Fondos de Pensiones), provides that each fund has a single managing and a single depositary entity. This gives rise to a system of mutual controls between the entities, and the legal regime of the liabilities arising from their actions. The new law allows pension funds to invest in foreign financial assets, where their investments are regulated by the statutory law pertaining to Spanish outward foreign investment and exchange control.

Colombian law affords substantial protection to those who act as commercial agents. Agents may claim compensation on termination of the agency relationship, regardless of the cause of termination, and regardless of the law which governs their contract, so long as the contract is performed in Colombia.

The development of the European asset-backed securities market took a significant step forward in October last year with the launch by Ford Credit of a highly innovative US$5billion global securitization programme. Globaldrive is the first Euro asset-backed programme to be set up by a corporate. It seeks to bring to Ford Credit's asset-backed issues the flexibility and efficiency of a medium-term note programme. The inaugural issue under the programme, an AAA rated Dm1 billion (US$550 million) floating rate issue backed by US dollar wholesale auto receivables, closed successfully on October 15 1997.

UK firm Allen & Overy announced that it is to merge with 65-lawyer Italian firm Brosio, Casati e Associati. Meanwhile, Haarmann Hemmelrath & Partner has become the second German firm to open an office in Italy. In the last year the following foreign firms have all opened in Italy or added to an existing presence: Clifford Chance, Freshfields, Simmons & Simmons and Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton.

The market for Brazilian sovereign debt is becoming increasingly attractive for international banks. By Walter Douglas Stuber and Adriana Maria Gödel of Amaro, Stuber e Advogados Associados, São Paulo

Anne Counihan of National Treasury Management Agency, Ireland talks to Diana Bentley

A number of foreign firms have left and are likely to leave Hungary, pushed out more by a change in the work on offer than by the planned amendments to the bar rules for foreign lawyers. Richard Forster reports

In October the Commission held an oral hearing to discuss the way forward following the publication of its Green Paper on vertical restraints, referred to in the March 1997 issue of International Financial Law Review (see page 62).

A new rule opens Saudi Arabia to independent power projects for the first time. Project finance is likely to take off, and the forthcoming power plant, Shuaiba, may be a BOO project. By Steven Miles of Arent Fox, Washington DC and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Tender bids for Singapore's second fixed-line licence and third mobile phone licence closed on December 31 1997.