Our Australia and New Zealand 2009 awards dinner draws a full house

FinanceAsia held its seventh annual awards dinner in Sydney last week to honour the winners of the 2009 Annual Achievement Awards for Australia and New Zealand. The event, which has developed a reputation for being a relaxed, unfussy party, was held at the magazine's signature venue at the Park Hyatt Hotel. The evening began with drinks in the hotel's Boardroom Library and moved on to the harbourkitchen&bar restaurant.

The dinner was attended by a full house of 150 guests, including issuers, bankers and service providers. Award winners gave a short speech when receiving their plaques and spoke about the challenging markets in 2009. While there were a record number of capital markets transactions in Australia last year, many of them fell into the distressed category. Deal makers expressed hope that 2010 will be a less traumatic year, although they agreed that the financial markets are still in a state of flux.

National Australia Bank picked up a case of wine for winning the trivia quiz, with the UBS and Macquarie tables sharing second place.

For a selection of photos from the evening, please click on the link to our gallery in the middle column on this page.