Barclays

Rating: Aaa/AAA

British American Tobacco has signed the first multicurrency revolving credit facility that uses a variety of risk-free rates as benchmarks, potentially clearing a hurdle that loan market participants have long said was hindering the transition from Libor.

International Finance Corporation defied volatility to achieve an impressive result in the dollar public sector bond market on Wednesday as it managed to bring in the spread by 4bp to price through the European Investment Bank.

India’s Tata Steel and Birla Carbon have decided not to syndicate their chunky loans, amid reluctance from the bookrunners to sell down their positions in a slowing market for deals.

Europe's high grade corporate bond issuers are being pushed into tight issuing windows by volatility caused by the Covid-19 coronavirus. But investors are prepared for this and so far deals have found strong backing.

Lancashire County Council raised £350m ($453.5m) of five year cash on Thursday through the UK Municipal Bonds Agency platform. It is the first local authority to do so since the MBA was set up.

British American Tobacco is considering switching its existing revolving credit facility from Libor to Sonia, following Royal Dutch Shell’s trail-blazing Sofr-linked syndicated loan last year. The move would demonstrate a more galvanised move away from Libor in the loan market.

Schneider Electric, the French electrical equipment company, and Carlsberg, the Danish brewer, zipped through the open window for corporate bond issuance on Wednesday, as bankers say coronavirus volatility has made this a market for opportunists.

Two German states rebooted the primary SSA market on Tuesday with intraday deals at the opposite ends of the euro curve. The five year deal was almost two times covered but there were no book updates for the 15 year.

US corporates leapt on the chance to print euros this week, with Honeywell, Berkshire Hathaway and Schlumberger all finding plenty of demand in the currency.

Relx, the UK specialist publisher, reopened the European corporate bond market on Tuesday after more than a week without any benchmark issuance. It was a convincing €2bn issue, but Relx had to pay double digit new issue premiums.

Activist investor Edward Bramson has called on Barclays not to renew chief executive Jes Staley’s contract over his links with dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He also questions the bank’s corporate broking relationship with JP Morgan.