Bank of America

ICBC opened books for the first syndicated offshore renminbi bond to be issued by its Sydney branch on Tuesday. It comes as Beijing looks to designate an official RMB clearing bank for Australia’s largest city by the end of this year.

Craig Coben and Mary Ann Deignan have been appointed co-heads of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s equity capital markets business globally.

Even as geopolitical risks caused spikes in volatility and many in the European FIG market headed off on holiday, Virgin Money Holdings opportunistically placed a £160m perpetual non-call five year additional tier one (AT1) deal, bringing in an oversubscribed book and highlighting that issuers can still tap the market at attractive levels.

Paraguay (Ba2/BB/BB-) will begin fixed income investor meetings on Tuesday as it plans its second ever international bond issue to finance infrastructure and energy projects.

Tata Steel raised $1.5bn with its inaugural transaction on Thursday, as it looks to refinance loans incurred as a result of its $13.1bn acquisition of Corus in 2008. Despite pricing on a day when almost $2.5bn of new issues was injected into the Indian high yield arena, the trade nonetheless pulled in bids worth $9.1bn.

Speculative grade debt has been hoping to polish up its image for some years now. US regulators want to make sure we remember it has warts but it doesn't need to scare us off.

Ross emerges on the buyside - SocGen hires DZ's MTN head - RBS's Anhamm heads back to ABN - Citi poaches MS bank analyst

David Ross, former head of EMEA leveraged finance at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has joined a leveraged loan-focused buyside firm as chief operating officer.

Conan Tam, a managing director in UBS’s DCM syndicate desk, has left the Swiss lender and is joining Bank of America Merrill Lynch, GlobalCapital Asia understands.

The Ministry of Strategy & Finance of the Republic of Korea has sold another chunk of its shares in Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK). Strong investor demand allowed the government to increase the size of its sale by a whopping 46%, to W364.2bn ($353m).

Patience, timing, confidence and precision. Brazil’s football team may have lacked these attributes in the recent world cup, but the liability management exercise that the sovereign carried out on Wednesday earned praise for showing these very factors.

The trend for ever more highly leveraged corporate deals gathered pace this week, as France’s Sebia prepared to sign its buyout loan after receiving healthy demand from investors, even as it emerged that US regulators were cracking down on the supposed excesses of the leveraged finance market.