MADRID – Nine principles for valuing the investment portfolios of hedge funds have been issued for comment* by the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), the Madrid-based umbrella body for regulators in over 100 countries. The principles have been drawn up by a working group chaired by Dan Waters, a director of the Financial Services Authority, Britain’s financial watchdog.

TIRANA – Albania plans to implement as a key objective the Basel II bank safety rules as part of a medium-term strategy for the development, licensing and supervision of banks, the country’s central bank chief said in early March.

GENEVA, Switzerland – Pakistan’s commercial banks will continue to develop their infrastructure, technology and human resources in order to adopt the international Basel II bank safety rules, the country’s central bank chief said in February.

WASHINGTON – Implementing the Basel II capital rules poses significant challenges to both banks and regulators in India, a top Indian central banker said in March.

LONDON – Charlie McCreevy, head of internal markets at the European Commission, sounded the alarm in late February over the way that the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) is being implemented across the 27 countries of the EU. One of the largest and most ambitious laws that the EU has ever enacted, MiFID is intended to create a single financial services market across much of Europe. But there is “a real risk that the dream of a single new rule book replacing 27 existing rule books could be turned into a real practical nightmare,” McCreevy told a High Level City Group event in London.

LONDON – A new, pan-European standard for post-trade transparency in bond markets is being proposed by the rapidly-expanding International Capital Markets Association (ICMA), a trade association and self-regulatory organisation (SRO) for participants in the securities markets. The move involves providing more trade information and market transparency for financial institutions and retail investors.

LONDON – Eligible capital of EU banks is reckoned to include some €213 billion in outstanding hybrid instruments, the increasingly popular types of securities that combine features of both debt and equity. This figure emerges from a quantitative analysis undertaken by the London-based Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS), which has the job of trying to harmonise bank supervision across the 27-country EU.

WASHINGTON – Banking regulators face the big challenge over the next five to ten years of deciding their response to the growing, and justified, concern of major international banks that they are subject to multiple regulatory regimes, with at best duplicative and at worst mutually incompatible requirements, a top banking supervisor said in March.

WASHINGTON – Europe wants the US to grant big American banks adopting the Basel II bank safety rules the option, barred to them under current proposals, of using the simpler approaches to assessing risks under the controversial bank capital accord.

SYDNEY – Australian banks using the simpler approaches to measuring their risks under the Basel II bank safety rules will, as expected, show on average modest reductions in regulatory capital, according to the preliminary results of a regulator study.