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ING Barings has shut its stockbroking and equities operations in India and Pakistan as part of a decision to reshape its operations in Asia and elsewhere in emerging markets. An ING Barings spokesman said that the bank will pull out of equities and debt trading, global depositary receipts and sales and research operations in India and Pakistan.

BRAZIL stole the limelight from its neighbours this week with a Eu500m five year debut in the increasingly hot euro-denominated Eurobond market. The offering, led by SBC Warburg Dillon Read and Paribas, was originally slated at Eu250m, but demand for high yielding bonds in the euro led to an eventual doubling in size.

THE REPUBLIC of Columbia will make its lira debut next week, immediately after Mexico's Pemex struggled to light up the market with a Lit200bn 10 year reverse floater issue. Led by Chase and JP Morgan, the Lit300bn Columbia issue will be in plain vanilla form; Pemex's issue suffered from it being the first emerging market borrower to offer such a highly structured bond in the Eurolira market.

CABLE & Wireless Communications is set to issue the biggest Yankee deal yet this year with a $1bn offering split into five, seven and 10 year tranches. HSBC and Merrill Lynch are joint lead and joint books for the issue, the company's debut in the US markets.

FEARS THAT Latin American banking is heading for a shakeout were fuelled this week when ING Barings announced it was sacking 200 of its staff in equity and fixed income. The retrenchments, which ING prefers to call "performance improvements", is primarily targeted at the considerable Latin American equity staff it inherited from Barings, but also spans Latin American fixed income and includes equity staff in India and Pakistan.

* Fitch IBCA this week added further pressure to the ratings outlook for the Russian Federation with the news that it had placed its BB+ rating on negative RatingWatch.

THE BRAZILIAN government will announce the winners of the fiercely contested Telebras privatisation advisory mandate on Monday, following a Lehman-led consortium's decision to withdraw a complaint about another consortium led by Salomon Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. The government had been facing a three week delay on the process -- which does not even include any guarantees for equity underwriting mandates -- because the Lehman-led Telebrasil 2000 consortium was worried that Salomon and MSDW would snatch the mandate away by bidding next to no fees for the business.

OIL concern YPF will become the first blue chip Latin sovereign to tap the Yankee bond market in March, when it launches a $200m five year bond. CSFB has won the highly coveted mandate, with Chase and JP Morgan as co-leads. Roadshows begin on February 23, with pricing the week after.

* Council of Europe Rating: Aaa/AAA

THE LEVEL of fees for international equity issues fell yet again this week when Dresdner Kleinwort Benson was mandated as global co-ordinator for the $5bn sale of stock in Endesa on a spread of 1.7% -- the lowest rate yet for a Spanish privatisation. That rate is down on the 1.75% spread for the final divestment of Argentaria shares, currently being completed by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and considerably lower than the 1.95% that Merrill Lynch received when it lead managed the last sale of Endesa shares.

A WIDE range of German companies are planning to tap the equity market over the next 12 months, offering investors an equally diverse spread of deals -- encompassing divestitures by companies unwinding cross-holdings as well as flotations. In the former category, Salomon Smith Barney this week successfully offered 11.8m shares in Continental, representing a 10.3% stake in the German tyre manufacturer. The shares were sold by Norddeutsche Landesbank and a group of other core investors that took the stake in the late 1980s to help defend the company against a hostile bid.

THE SUPPLY of stock from the Netherlands looks set to pick up after the expected pricing today (Friday) of the first Dutch IPO of the year, for IT hardware and software producer Copaco. The shares will be listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange with trading set to begin this afternoon. The transaction involves the sale of 3.35m ordinary shares with full voting rights.