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Is there mischief afoot at Goldman Sachs in London, the house where a convoy of Brink's-Mat armoured vans is expected to arrive early in the new year carrying the 1999 bonus payments? The owner of a local wine bar tells us after eavesdropping on snatches of conversation that Goldman's total group's bonus payments could fund the budget deficit of many a third world country. But amid the jubilation and the bonhomie, are all the Goldman employees happy bunnies? Last week, as well as in previous columns, we suggested that the European debt capital markets division was something of a lame duck or a hobbled tortoise. While European M&A, international equities and the blistering J Aron commodities business have been almost buried under a mountain of money, the fixed income operation has been a wet blanket.

ABN Amro this week launched a $200m securitisation for project company Companhia Petrolífera Marlim, the proceeds of which will fund development of the Campo de Marlim oilfield off the coast of Brazil's Rio de Janeiro region. "We were looking to launch earlier this year," said a securitisation official at ABN Amro in London, "but in the third quarter Petrobras changed its accounting practices to US GAAP, so we had to wait. Once the paperwork was completed, we immediately launched the marketing process."

Italy's largest life assurance company, Alleanza Assicurazioni, launched what is believed to be the first securitisation of life policy loans last Friday (December 10), in a Eu278.3m transaction via Salomon Smith Barney. Like most Italian life assurers, Alleanza extends loans to holders of its life policies who would otherwise have to seek a consumer loan from a bank. The loans have the unique characteristic that the borrowers cannot default.

The controversy over the German government's plan to privatise the housing estate of the national railway company Deutsche Bahn blew up into a full scale national scandal this week. The Green Party has discovered that the owners of the largest member of the German consortium bidding for the 112,000 homes donated DM6m to the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in September 1998, just three months after the CDU government decided to sell the properties to the consortium.

* Banca Nazionale del Lavoro is on the verge of awarding a mandate to buy or securitise non-performing loans, mostly mortgages, with a face value of Lit2.8tr (Eu1.45bn). JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Paribas are in contention. JP Morgan is offering to buy the assets outright, and Morgan Stanley's track record suggests that it would do the same, while Paribas proposes to pay a reduced purchase price ahead of securitisation and let the seller keep the equity. The deal is likely to emerge in the first half of next year.