It is well established that the nucleophilicity of a heteroatom can be greatly increased by the introduction of an adjacent heteroatom. Known as the α-effect, 8 and rationalised by frontier molecular orbital theory, 9 it has been used to explain the reactivity of a number of systems and has previously been exploited to accelerate synthetic transformations. 10 We believed that we could depart from the constraints inherent to this five membered ring system by taking advantage of the ...
