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CHASE Manhattan and WestLB have secured the mandate to arrange a £425m senior debt facility for Azurix, a subsidiary of Enron, that has been set up to acquire water assets in Europe and further afield. The three year facility will finance the development of the new subsidiary and its operations and also refinance what is left from the $2.32bn senior debt package used by Enron Water Europe plc to acquire Wessex Water plc that was signed on December 15.

BANQUE Nationale de Paris and Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich have won the mandate to arrange a Eu60m term loan for SKB Banka, Slovenia's leading private bank. They have fully underwritten the deal. The facility has a maturity of five years, and starts to amortise after two years. The margin for the first three years is 47.5bp over Euribor, going up to 50bp for years four and five. The loan will be used for general corporate purposes. Before syndication DG Bank joined the mandated arrangers as an arranger, and BNP and RZB are approaching possible co-arrangers. When the borrower's audited 1998 figures are made public in mid-April, the deal will be launched into general syndication. Some bankers think the deal will be popular and could be oversubscribed. But the borrower may choose to keep the volume low for this transaction, and to take advantage of a likely fall in prices with another deal later this year. However, others say the deal is a little too tight considering the size of the transaction, and because the small size of the bank limits the amount of ancillary business on offer. Observers suggest that the war in the Balkans could create difficulties for the launch of the deal. One banker pointed to the spike in spreads on bonds from the region over the last two days, as evidence of investors' uncertainty. The borrower is the biggest private bank in Slovenia in terms of capital and total assets, and the second largest in terms of capital. It has eight subsidiaries active in leasing, factoring, real estate, custody services and investment funds. *

THE EBRD and four commercial banks -- American Express, Bankgesellschaft Berlin, Hamburgische Landesbank and Landesbank Schleswig-Holstein -- have joined forces to bring a Eu55m facility for Vilniaus Bankas to the market. The EBRD and Bankgesellschaft Berlin are joint bookrunners. The fully underwritten deal has two tranches. The Eu20m 'A' tranche, lent by the EBRD alone, is a five year bullet facility priced at 225bp over Libor.

France Speculation grew this week that Pinault-Printemps plans to tap the loan market for a facility to part finance its bid for Gucci.

MANNESMANN has selected Deutsche Bank to sole co-ordinate the Eu7.65bn term loan that will part finance its proposed acquisition of Olivetti's interests in Omnitel Pronto Italia and Infostrada. Deutsche's position as sole arranger has surprised many in the market -- bankers had expected that because of the large size of the deal, at least two banks would arrange it. Indeed, Commerzbank and Merrill Lynch have been linked with the deal since Mannesmann made it clear that it was planning to buy up Olivetti's telecom assets.

CSFB AND Mediobanca have completed the international flotation of 90m shares in Ducati, the Italian motorcycle manufacturer -- pricing the shares at Eu2.90 against an indicated range of Eu250-Eu310. Although the book was well oversubscribed, the lead managers adopted a cautious approach to pricing in view of the element of new issue fatigue in the capital markets at the moment.

THE UK Private Finance Initiative (PFI) project bond market has sprung back into life over the past week, with the launch of two issues -- one introducing investors to a new asset class and the second reinforcing the credibility of an existing sector, healthcare. Ending a hiatus since the third quarter of last year, RBC DS Global Markets brought the first water utility PFI bond to market with the launch of a £79.3m issue through Stirling Water Seafield Finance plc, for the Stirling Water consortium.

NOMURA'S principal finance group this week launched the largest securitisation of UK pubs, parcelling rents and beer sales revenues from its Unique Pub Co into £810m of bonds with maturities out to 25 years. Nomura created Unique in December last year, by selecting 2,614 pubs from the 4,300 in the Inntrepreneur and Spring Inns portfolios that it had bought from Grand Met and Fosters for £1.2bn at the end of 1997.

GOLDMAN Sachs this week launched an innovative credit linked structure that provides a hedge for some of the insurance exposure of Gerling Insurance Group. Gerling's intention is to free up capital that it holds against the remote risk of very severe losses on its portfolio of credit insurance contracts for small businesses. But the insurer has avoided the uncomfortable process of having its books picked over by rating agencies, by using a separate pool of businesses as the reference portfolio.

JOINT bookrunners Bear Stearns, De Nationale Investeringsbank and ING Barings-BBL this week launched the fourth in a series of securitisations of Dutch residential mortgages for subsidiaries of DNIB, or insurance companies that originate mortgages financed by the bank. The Dutch tax system is highly favourable to home ownership, and has encouraged insurance companies to originate sophisticated savings and investment mortgages linked to insurance policies -- the combination is in part a tax shelter for the borrowers.

BANK OF Tokyo-Mitsubishi this week priced its $1bn securitisation of loans to US corporates, Millennium Loan Trust. JP Morgan and Tokyo-Mitsubishi International ran the books jointly for the deal's $450m 'A1' tranche -- unusually for a US CLO, it has a passthrough rather than a soft bullet structure. With an average life of 1.9 years and expected maturity in July 2002, it priced at 22bp over one month Libor.

The prices of forwards, futures and options contain a great deal of information about what the market thinks or fears about future market conditions.