Covered Bonds

Robert Gardiner, who yesterday (Monday) resigned from Crédit Agricole CIB, is believed to be joining HSBC.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena is taking the place of UBI Banca in reopening the Italian covered bond market, launching its inaugural deal today (Tuesday), but the reopening of the obbligazioni bancarie garantite segment has been badly managed, according to bankers. Meanwhile, four other issues are accessing the market today.

Fitch has affirmed the rating of mortgage-backed covered bonds issued by Barclays Bank at AAA after assigning the programme a worse Discontinuity Factor because it assessed a pre-maturity test incorporated in the programme as weaker than it did before.

In brief: Robert Gardiner has left Crédit Agricole, where he was a director on the syndicate desk in London.

The issuers of 19 covered bond programmes still being reviewed as a result of Standard & Poor’s revised rating criteria are in the advanced stages of changing the structure or collateralisation of their programmes to mitigate asset-liability mismatch risk (ALMM), the rating agency said on Friday.

A planned debut covered bond for Korea Housing Finance Corporation has been assigned a Aa3 rating, one notch above that of the issuer’s A1 rating. This compares with a three notch uplift achieved by the first Asian covered bond, although KHFC’s structure appears simpler.

Four covered bond issuers were this (Monday) morning said to be lining up to tap the covered bond market, with the level being floated for a mooted Italian transaction surprising market participants.

Settled purchases of covered bonds bought under the European Central Bank’s Eu60bn programme grew by Eu1.666bn this week, the eighth biggest week’s increase out of 49 weeks of reporting.

Standard & Poor’s yesterday (Thursday), under its revised rating criteria, affirmed at AAA one Dutch, two Irish, two UK, and two Danish covered bond programmes, and upgraded to AAA asset covered securities issued by the former WestLB Covered Bond Bank.

Korea Housing Finance Corp is meeting international investors next week ahead of a benchmark covered bond that would be only the second from Asia.

ASB Bank, the New Zealand subsidiary of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, is considering a covered bond issue, Kerry Francis, chief executive of corporate and institutional banking, told EuroWeek Asia.