Banks

The Asian Development Bank took advantage of strong investor appetite in the dollar bond market on Wednesday to make a deal that matched the spread Oesterreichische Kontrollbank paid on a five year dollar issue on Tuesday.

Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway company, launched a £300m bond at a wafer thin spread on Wednesday, but investor demand still more than twice covered the deal.

Smurfit Kappa, the Irish paper and cardboard packaging company, has signed its first sustainability-linked loan for €1.35bn, at the same time as setting new targets to reduce its carbon footprint and water use and employ more women.

At this year’s Central & Eastern European Forum, Société Générale hosted the workshop titled ‘CEE central banks’ balance sheet expansion: a necessity or a risk?’. The speakers were Radoslaw Cholewinski (deputy head of fixed income at Pekao TFI), Martin Dolejs (portfolio manager, pension fund and insurance portfolios at Allianz), and Zoltan Aroksallasi (FX and rate strategist at Erste Bank), and I thank them for their insight, their knowledge, and their time. By Marek Drimal, EMEA Strategist, moderator of the workshop.

Anglo-German travel and tourism group TUI has completed its heavily discounted €544m rights issue, which is part of a bailout of the company.

ANZ returned to the euro market with a tier twovlinked to the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDG) this week — going on to print a deal that was over three times covered at guidance.

Oman Electricity Transmission Company, a partially state-owned utility company, entered the market on Wednesday for a dollar bond, just two weeks after the high yielding sovereign raised a dollar offering.

The Republic of Armenia sold a $750m 10 year bond on Tuesday, which market participants said was “expensive” for investors, with a negative new issue premium of 10bp.

The Republic of Slovenia sold its longest ever bond issue on Wednesday, just three weeks after it sold a €2bn deal. The bid for duration was evident as investors piled in with more than €4bn of orders.

Richard Luddington has joined Rothschild as a senior advisor focusing mainly on sovereigns and quasi-sovereigns in central and eastern Europe as well as the broader Europe, the Middle East and Africa region.

Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (BIL) ventured into the Swedish and Norwegian markets for the first time this week. With many of Europe's big banks absent from the MTN market this year, dealers are instead chasing more unusual deals from rarer names.

IDB Invest, the private sector arm of the Inter-American Development Bank, is preparing to issue the first bond under its new sustainability debt framework.