Macquarie Bank is in for another busy few weeks, as it lodges
the prospectus for its $1 billion media fund and puts the finishing
touches on a bid for the London Stock Exchange, reports The Smage. The prospectus for Macquarie Media Group was due to be lodged
last Wednesday, but a last-minute rewrite of some sections relating
to its fee structure forced the fund to delay its release. The new
prospectus must now go through some compliance checks before it can
be given the go ahead, which is expected to be at the end of this
week.

Goldman Sachs JBWere’s chief investment officer, retail, Mike
Hawkins, has been alerting the firm’s clients to a curious fact:
shares in Australian companies are being valued more highly across
the board than their international equivalents, says Malcom Maiden in The Smage. And Hawkins has told Goldman Sachs JBWere’s clients that he thinks
the local sharemarket’s move en masse into the dress circle is
unprecedented, and probably unsustainable.

The Fin Review reports that later this month, the ACCC will
unveil what it says are “radical” new guidelines for media mergers as
it prepares for the Howard government’s deregulation of cross and
foreign-ownership rules. Market definitions would be key to the new
guidelines according to ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel.

And global mining giant Rio Tinto has shrugged off
its habitual secrecy to showcase a suite of advanced exploration
projects and potential new developments that it says will, at the very
least, underwrite its production profile in the decades after 2010, reports The Australian.