Quickbites

A Vietnam-US aviation seminar is also to be held in Hanoi from March 18-20 for Officials from the two countries to discuss aviation issues such as Air traffic, customs formalities and aircraft techniques, the official said. Seminar participants would also discuss the potentially lucrative market for passenger and cargo traffic between Vietnam and the United States.

No politics withpipeline: US

The United States has said it would like to see a pipeline bringing gas from Central Asia to the Pakistani and Indian markets completely insulated from the politics of the region and of individual countries. 8220;There is a lot of gas and oil in central Asia and it is one of the great untapped reservoirs of energy left in the world. So it is important as an assurance of energy stability in the marketplace for a long time to come, provided one can work out commercially viable, environmentally careful and politically stable pathways for this energy to be tapped and transported,8221; a senior US administration official said yesterday. He said, 8220;the largest emerging markets for energy, especially natural gas, are Pakistan and India. There are a variety of ways by which that energy can reach these countries, and so that is one of the great commercial and political issues that are out there in terms of future sources of energy supply.

Japan to securitise bad debts

A Japanese state-backedbank will securitise 130 billion yen 1.02 billion worth of bad loans by raising funds on the Euromarket, a newspaper said. The Resolution and Collection Bank, which takes over bad loans Left by failed financial institutions, plans the securitisation in cooperation with Daiwa Securities Co. Ltd.8217;s European unit, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said. Under the scheme, the bank will transfer bad loans to a special-purpose company SPC to be set up in the Cayman Islands. The company in the tax haven will issue debt securities for sale to institutional investors in Europe as early as April, lending the funds raised to the Resolution and Collection Bank, the daily said.

The bank will use the funds to take over non-performing debts from newly-collapsed Financial institutions, while repaying the borrowing from the SPC by collecting bad loans it took over earlier, the paper said. But the paper added only 30-to-40 billion yen of securities can be issued, as the market value of real estate used as collateral for the 130billion yen worth of bad loans had plunged to some 50 billion yen.