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Carey Olsen has advised Insight Investment Management on the establishment of a Guernsey registered fund constituted as a limited partnership, which will invest in distressed consumer debt and is listed on the Irish Stock Exchange.
The Insight Consumer Debt Recovery Fund II is aiming to raise EUR400m in total commitments.
Carey Olsen partner Graham Hall (pictured) and associate Alex Mauger acted for Insight on the establishment of the fund entities and advised on a range of aspects in respect of regulation and the fund’s operational documentation.
Hall says: “The establishment of distressed debt funds is growing as a consequence of
The UK Supreme Court, in the conjoined appeals in Rubin and New Cap, has rejected the modified universalist doctrine that established common law rules as to the enforcement of foreign judgments, do not (or should not) apply to insolvency orders.
According to law firm Harneys, in giving the leading judgment and overturning the Court of Appeal, Lord Collins reaffirmed the application of the common law rules on the enforcement of foreign judgments to insolvency orders.
There is no separate rule for judgments given in insolvency proceedings. So to enforce foreign insolvency orders at common law in England, foreign officeholders will
Dion Global Solutions has launched its Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) solutions.
Comprising two integrated products, FATCA FORCE and FATCA TRAC, the Dion product suite offers a complete solution to the forthcoming FATCA regulations, and is designed to support future client classification and reporting requirements.
FATCA FORCE is a project monitoring dashboard, which enables firms to establish their operational readiness for FATCA compliance, based on all relevant IRS checkpoints. It contains work-streams to identify preparatory steps required to achieve compliance and generates evaluation reports based on a weighted combination of both empirical and subjective perception data. FATCA FORCE
Sciens Capital Management Group has appointed Farhang Mehregani as chief investment officer of Sciens Alternative Investments (SAI) division.
SAI comprises Sciens funds of hedge funds business, managed account services, investment services and advisory solutions.
Mehregani will report to Sciens Alternative Investments chief executive officer Stavros Siokos, and will also be a member of the investment committee for Sciens’ fund of funds business.
Siokos says: “We welcome Farhang as a strategic addition to the team. His extensive experience gained in risk management and the hedge fund environment will prove invaluable to Sciens and in helping our clients to achieve their
Fitch Ratings expects credit markets to be less directional in the coming months.
As a result, short duration, lower volatility and absolute return strategies with more performance contribution from bond picking will gain traction and are currently being launched by most advanced asset managers.
Low growth and sustained net inflows (EUR228bn year to date to credit funds globally according to Lipper) have provided a supportive environment for the credit asset class over the past three years. Meanwhile, corporates continue to enjoy solid fundamentals, historically low defaults, lower leverage and ample access to liquidity.
However, at the current low levels of
Phoenix Investment Adviser, a private investment firm that specialises in high-yield corporate debt, has named Peter Hughes as a senior research analyst.
As a part of the investment team, he will cover the technology, business services, retail, restaurant, and metals and mining sectors.
Hughes is the most recent of several senior hires appointed in response to increasing interest from institutional allocators – including a recent USD40m seed investment into Phoenix’s Institutional Credit Opportunity Fund. Hughes will report to Phoenix’s founder and chief investment officer Jeffrey Peskind.
Founded nearly a decade ago, Phoenix focuses on bonds of highly leveraged US companies
Double Haven Capital Management (Hong Kong) Limited (Double Haven) has acquired the hedge fund platform, DragonBack Capital Limited.


Prior to the acquisition, Double Haven had outsourced its operations, risk and other back office functions to the team at DragonBack. These functions will now all be in-house with the same team joining Double Haven. As a result of the acquisition, the Double Haven group will benefit from the new synergies and efficiencies of having a dedicated operations, risk and back-office team in-house as well as being independently licensed by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.


Darryl Flint, CEO and CIO
Privately-held businesses in debt crisis-stricken Portugal, Spain and Italy are in many respects in better financial health than their publicly-listed peers, according to analysis from S&P Capital IQ.
While recent investor concerns over the ability of Portugal, Spain and Italy to service their sovereign debt have helped to depress local equity markets, S&P Capital IQ’s analysis shows that – in the aggregate – private companies in those three countries enjoy better short-term liquidity profiles and revenue growth reports while maintaining lower leverage rates than their public counterparts.
“These findings highlight that, while many public companies in Southern Europe are
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has issued final interpretative guidance to, under certain circumstances, exempt foreign regulators from the indemnification and confidentiality provisions in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
This exemption applies generally to data that is reported pursuant to foreign law and if the swap data repository (SDR) is registered, recognised, or otherwise authorised by the country’s law and regulation.
The Commission voted three to two via seriatim to issue the guidance, which will become effective upon publication in the Federal Register.
Specifically, the Commission’s guidance states that a registered SDR would not be subject
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has issued an order filing and settling charges that Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a futures commission merchant based in Purchase, New York, violated CFTC regulation 166.3 by failing to diligently supervise its employees’ handling of customer accounts.
The CFTC order requires Morgan Stanley Smith Barney to pay a USD200,000 civil monetary penalty and prohibits it from violating CFTC regulation 166.3, as charged.
According to the order, Morgan Stanley had a customer (Customer A) that provided trust services for Customer A’s clients. However, as the CFTC’s order finds, Customer A was itself acting as an
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