State-owned Hungarian Development Bank (MFB) plans to debut on the international capital markets with EUR 500mn issue in March, bank's managing director Gyorgy Szelenyi announced as quoted by MTI News Agency. He elaborated that HSBC and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein have been mandated to lead manage the issue. The bulk of the proceeds is envisaged to refinance a EUR 450mn bond maturing this year, while the rest will be used to finance new development programmes. Noteworthy, Szelenyi said that the issue was expected to be priced at spreads similar to those of the sovereign issues of the government. On a related note MFB's unconsolidated HAS based net profit in 2005 grew by 73.1% to HUF 19.4bn . We note that the steep rise in the figure was mainly associated to the freeing up of HUF 13.5bn in risk provisions on state-owned company SZOVUR.