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n The Turkish government is considering the privatisation of its national oil group, Tupras. The company has flirted with the international equity markets in the past five years but in the event always balked at a flotation. The stock is to be sold by the Privatisation Administration, the government holding company charged with most of the state's divestment programme.

WARBURG DILLON Read and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter have been appointed global co-ordinators for the $500m to $600m sale of stock in Partner Group, the Israeli mobile phone operation sponsored by the Hutchison Whampoa group. The company is to be floated on the international equity markets in the second half of the year in potentially one of the most exciting deals of 1999.

WARBURG DILLON Read this week executed the £45.6m sale of stock for UK merchant bank Close Brothers, financing its £47m take-over of Rea Brothers Group, the private banking and asset management company. The lead manager fully underwrote the deal at a tight (though undisclosed) spread and placed the stock in a matter of hours.

MORGAN Stanley Dean Witter has broken the run of disappointing Spanish IPOs with the Eu600m sale of stock in Sogecable, the local media group subsidiary of Canal Plus. The Madrid stockmarket has been unimpressed by a number of mid-cap flotations and although investors welcomed Repsol's jumbo Eu4.8bn capital increase, other deals have not lived up to their promising expectations. With Sogecable, however, the book of demand was more than 20 times covered with an exceptionally high quality of buyers involved. This allowed the lead firm to price the shares at Eu23.50 - the top end of the indicated price range - and still see the stock trade well in the aftermarket.

The supply of German blue-chip equity is set to increase in the third and fourth quarter of this year as a large number of well-known groups, such as Hoescht and Siemens, spin off some of their subsidiary companies to concentrate on core assets. That has sparked a race between investment banks keen to secure mandates to distribute stock in these spun-off

Despite a correction on Wall Street early this week amid renewed fears over possible interest rate increases, it was a hectic week for new issues in the US primary equity markets. One of the largest internet IPOs to date, the $252m offering from online music distributor MP3.com, as also one of the most popular. Like Music.maker.com, which floated successfully two weeks ago, MP3 provides customised music CDs online at discounted prices to mainstream record stores.

WITH ONLY a few weeks to go before the equity and equity linked debt markets close for the summer, Deutsche Bank (books) and ABN Amro Rothschild this week launched the Eu100m convertible bond for CSM, the Dutch producer of sugar and sugar products. The group, which was publicly floated in 1919, has a huge following in the local market with some 38% of its shares held by retail investors. While the bulk of its equity is in free float, 10% is held between ING Groep and local pension fund Algemeen Burgerlijk.

CSFB AND Cazenove are to conclude the sale of stock in Freeserve this weekend. The flotation of the free UK internet service provider by parent group Dixons has sparked as much interest as it has controversy. The deal has been dogged with criticism from analysts arguing that Freeserve will be vulnerable to competition from US and other UK providers. But the keen levels of interest expressed by investors in its shares has followed through to a heavy oversubscription.