On April 6, MTS started to provide the Italian Treasury with a ‘tap auction’ facility, which enables the sale of bonds from past issues at their current market price.  The first ‘tap auction’ operation produced an excellent result in terms of efficiency and response times. Bonds worth 1 billion Euros were issued in less than 15 minutes. This is the most recent tool provided to European sovereign issuers, to help their debt management, in addition to the other market solutions already existing, like standard auctions, switch auctions, taps and buy-backs.