Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse launched its second opco level euro senior unsecured deal of the year on Tuesday, and appeared to suffer little ill effect from a Fitch downgrade last week.

Property developer Frasers Centrepoint is likely to begin bookbuilding on Friday for a potential S$900m ($651.5m) real estate investment trust IPO in Singapore, a source close to the deal told GlobalCapital Asia.

Korea Gas Corp (KoGas) has kicked off preparations for its first international bond of the year, which will hit the market next month.

Bad debt manager China Huarong Asset Management executed one of the largest dollar-denominated transactions from Asia this year with a $2.5bn triple-tranche offering that was multiple times covered.

Minority shareholders in Evry, a Norwegian IT company controlled by Apax Partners, were dismayed to learn this week that Apax had not told them it planned to extract a €203m dividend from the firm, even as it is trying to buy them out, writes Max Bower.

Bayer and Monsanto are circling each other as they both seek acceptable terms for a merger that would create a world leader in crop science. For the equity capital markets, the deal holds out the possibility of one of the world’s largest ever rights issues.

Agro-chemical giant Monsanto this week rejected a first, $62bn takeover approach from Bayer but with both companies open to a deal, banks, led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse, are preparing for the huge financing package expected.

Credit Suisse has promoted its head of US leveraged finance capital markets to vice chairman of acquisition and leveraged finance capital markets, which is a recently created role.

Indonesian medical testing firm Prodia has named a pair of bulge brackets and a local firm to run its listing, which it plans to launch this year.

China Huarong Asset Management and Midea Group are out with their respective dollar offerings while France’s BPCE is attracting bids for a Singapore dollar-denominated Basel III tier two.

Monsanto has rejected Bayer’s all-cash bid of a $62bn enterprise value as “incomplete and financially inadequate”, but left the door open to an improved offer.

Monday night’s three equity block trades in Europe all led to decent trading in the stocks on Tuesday. They included CVC’s exit from Evonik Industries – scooped on a sole basis by JP Morgan, though Bank of America Merrill Lynch has worked on most of these deals.