“…Our recent studies on phosphazanes and their organometallic complexes (Murugavel, Krishnamurthy, Nethaji & Chandrasekhar, 1993;Murugavel, Kumaravel, Krishnamurthy, Nethaji & Chandrasekhar, 1994) have shown that 'negative hyperconjugation' plays a key role in determining the P~N bond distance. In the title compound, a very short P--N single bond [1.604 (7),~] was observed; this is shorter than those in phosphinoamine complexes [1.68-1.75 ,~, (Balakrishna et al, 1994;Burrow, Farrar & Honeyman, 1994)] and close to the value observed for a ~N double bond [,,~ 1.57 ~, (Corbridge, 1974)…”