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BRITISH Steel, after raising Eu400m via a Eurobond this week, has cut its requirements from the loan market from Eu2.25bn to Eu1.85bn at the most. The arranging roles for the loan have yet to be mandated and deal's terms are undecided. Most observers believe that the arranging banks will be ABN Amro, Citibank, Dresdner and HSBC. Some 18 banks are thought to have bid.

Ghana The Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod) is about a week a way from mandating a consortium of two banks to arrange its pre-export financing. Market sources say Barclays is one of the front

APPETITE for Air Liquide's £4.3bn senior debt facility backing its acquisition of 50% of British Oxygen Company has been extraordinarily strong. According to arrangers Banque Nationale de Paris and Crédit Agricole Indosuez, general syndication may not be necessary - every single bank asked to join the deal at the senior co-arranger level has said yes. Some 20 banks were invited and the arrangers had thought they would get about 14 acceptances at the most.

Has the Portuguese treasury done an about-turn on its plans to tap the loan market? Only one week after bankers were saying that the Republic of Portugal had dropped the idea of raising a syndicated loan as a result of the disappointing number of bidding banks, well placed sources report that the sovereign is close to appointing a small group of banks to arrange a Eu1.5bn standby revolving credit.

El Salvador Citibank NA has won the mandate to arrange a $100m six year term loan for Telefónica El Salvador.

The Skr1.5bn debut for Hotellus International has achieved an oversubscription with a few more banks yet to come in, after what some banks believe was a difficult syndication. It should close by the end of August. SEB won the mandate in early May, with MeritaNordbanken joining as co-arranger, and has since been looking for a small club syndicate. This deal is not purely refinancing for bilateral lines, but also raises new money for property acquisitions.

Mark Vincent is leaving Bankgesellschaft Berlin to go to ABN Amro, from August 23. He had previously worked at Union Bank of Switzerland. His new role will focus on origination in UK and Ireland. In the ABN Amro team, Brenda Mills is head of syndications. She also worked at UBS. Lucy Konie has moved to the Libor salesforce in the fixed income division of ABN Amro, from the London based loan syndication team.

Aren't you slightly tired of the tidal wave of propaganda being released by the three French banks which have been dancing at each others' altars and at the boudoir door since the beginning of the year? Unless you were an advertising manager on one of the big financial dailies (haven't they had a field day?), your eyes would be glazing over with the sheer weight of the shareholder schmoozing.

Hong Kong Citicorp International is sounding out banks on a deal for Amoy Properties' financing of the Kowloon Station Package Four Development.

ING Barings has agreed to buy UBS's four asset backed commercial paper conduits for an undisclosed sum, in an unprecedented deal that simultaneously takes one of the leading European conduit banks out of the market, and catapults a relative minnow to the top of the table. UBS made plentiful and creative use of its conduits during the 1990s, but the business fell foul of the merger with SBC, which led to a radical rethink of the bank's investment banking activities. In January this year Warburg Dillon Read's outgoing chief executive Hans de Gier told investors that the balance sheet intensive ABCP business was now "non-core". UBS announced the sale of its conduits in the spring.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter this week sold its third securitisation of Italian non-performing mortgages, still without a full public launch but with more publicity than the first two transactions. The deal is backed by 799 loans that Morgan Stanley acquired from Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna in December 1998, and a single asset the bank bought from Istituto Italiano di Credito Fondiario in June this year.