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The lighter side of the past month in the world of financial law

While US bond issuers would tend to favour flexibility in devising their covenant packages, investors can also fight back

As far as risk management goes, the term seems almost trivial when applied to Brexit. Getting past the first step – identifying potential hazards and how those scenarios might play out – is difficult. Brexit has no clear form or shape, no step-by-step plan to follow and very little in the way of a timeline, beyond those two years from article 50 being triggered that everyone keeps talking about.

Hong Kong and Singapore are once again going head-to-head, vying for two of the year's most coveted initial public offerings (IPOs) – Alibaba-backed Ant Financial's $10 billion offering and Saudi Aramco's $100 billion deal.

This new asset class may classify as bail-in eligible debt, but teething problems have been felt in several EU jurisdictions

On November 23 2016, the Swiss Federal Council published its dispatch for a reform of Swiss corporate law. Along with the dispatch, a draft act amending the Swiss Code of Obligations was presented. The draft act seeks to modernise Swiss corporate law with a focus on increasing the flexibility of the provisions governing company formation and capital structure. Furthermore, it aims to modernise corporate governance by strengthening shareholder rights, and promoting gender diversity on corporate boards and senior management of listed companies. It also replaces the provisions of the (interim) Ordinance on Excessive Compensation (Minder-Ordinance) by a federal act of parliament with only a few changes. Depending on how parliament receives this project, we expect the draft act to enter into force as early as 2019.

Vietnam has kept distribution services, including retail business, open to foreign investors for years without any restriction. The only exception to this has been certain kinds of goods, such as rice, oil, medicines and cigarettes, which are monopolised by domestic enterprises, and the need for an application for the Economic Need Test (ENT) required for the opening of each individual retail shop by foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs).

The revision of law 5/2011, which approved the smoking prevention and control bill, is still pending and, though a full smoking ban in casinos was the initial plan of the Macau government, it may not actually happen after all.

Another round of consolidation in the Iberian financial sector is expected in 2017. And, if only in terms of the semi-announced and widely discounted merger between Bankia and Banco Mare Nostrum (BMN), this new round does indeed seem likely. More broadly, the present map of institutions, with roughly 15 substantial financial groups (though with remarkable differences in size) is commonly acknowledged as an intermediate stage in the route towards a landscape that will be dominated probably by fewer than 10 groups.

Amendments to the Payment Services Act and several related laws concerning virtual currencies are expected to come into effect after April 2017. In response to the amendments, the Financial Service Agency of Japan announced the draft of the Cabinet Office Ordinance concerning virtual currency exchange service providers on December 28 2016. The Ordinance sets forth the details of the rules for virtual currency exchange service providers (VCESP).