Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

Lenders unconcerned as recession portents mount — Booking Holdings gets global group for revolver — Pemberton raises €3.2bn more for Europe’s mid-market — Eurotorg re-enters rouble debt market

Poland’s prefunding for 2020 may even be higher as a proportion of total funding than the 34% it reached for 2019, said Robert Zima, head of the debt management office (DMO) in Warsaw, thanks to an expected lower budget deficit which means that the country’s total borrowing requirements are set to fall.

Belarusian food retailer Eurotorg has hit the Russian rouble-denominated debt capital markets for the second time this year, raising a Rb3.5bn ($52m) loan.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Deutsche Bank of hiring relatives of executives of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the Asia Pacific and Russia, in order to win business from those entities.

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.