Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

Emerging market equities have had a torrid few weeks as investors sell riskier assets over fears they will suffer if US-China trade tensions exacerbating a global economic slowdown. This has limited the supply of new deals from certain countries this year but as always in EM there are pockets of opportunity and this year’s success story has been Russia.

International investors are divided over whether to put more money to work in the Russian domestic bond market after the latest round of US sanctions against the Russian sovereign.

Albaraka Turk Participation Bank and the Islamic Development Bank have signed a $40m Islamic financing facility to support small and medium enterprises in Turkey.

Sanctions on a country’s sovereign debt do not typically herald a windfall of fee-earning bond market business in that country, but Russia may prove an exception. If the sovereign distorts prices in the domestic market, Russian corporates and banks may look to the international market to borrow instead.

Tinkoff Bank, a Russian online bank, may return to the Eurobond market as early as this year as the prices on offer for their international bonds look attractive, even after the latest set of US sanctions on Russia, according to Larisa Chernysheva, head of investor relations at Tinkoff.

The European Central Bank said on Thursday that AS PNB Banka was "failing or likely to fail", marking the second time in as many years that a Latvian bank has been declared insolvent.

Chinese lending to and investment in central and eastern Europe is on the up. China has extended its reach to rival the influence of its western counterparts with its best weapon: money. But many bankers speaking to GlobalCapital this week think the trend is problematic.

Ukrainian energy company DTEK is struggling to halt a slide in its bond trading since the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) issued notices of suspicion to six individuals — two of whom are DTEK employees — involved in a coal pricing controversy. The bonds have lost around five points in the space of a week.

A number of highly anticipated emerging market IPO issuers are understood to have shifted listing plans to next year instead of the last quarter of 2019.

ING's Turkish arm, ING Bank AS, has raised a $309m-equivalent trade finance loan from international lenders. The deal is a precursor to the year's second round of Turkish bank refinances, expected to begin in the next month.

The rout of the incumbent president Mauricio Macri in the first round of the Argentina elections has investors worried. Argentina’s debt, and that of other 'vulnerable' credits, suffered a huge sell-off early on Monday. But bankers believe that it was not so bad that the primary market will not reopen in September.

International banks should stand their ground and continue lending to Russian borrowers. The weak, ineffective sanctions that the US rolled out last week have not affected Russia’s creditworthiness and some even argue that investors in the country face fewer risks than they did two weeks ago.