A clean, palladium-catalyzed oxidative esterification of aldehydes using benzyl chloride

A highly efficient, mild, simple and clean procedure is presented for the one-pot oxidation of aromatic and aliphatic aldehydes to their corresponding ethyl esters using benzyl chloride as the oxidant under palladium-catalyzed conditions. The reaction is complete in just 30 min under microwave irradiation and inert conditions are not required to obtain good to excellent yields (65-93%) of isolated products.