Middle East Bonds

Emirates NBD has hired Jonathan Morris as the group’s general manager of wholesale banking and member of the group’s executive committee.

UAE real estate developer Dubai Investments Park is planning its debut $300m five year sukuk. It has set dates for a roadshow, starting on Sunday, to bring the first dollar sukuk from the Middle East of the year, despite a selloff in emerging markets over the last fortnight.

Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank began roadshows on Tuesday, with further meetings scheduled on Wednesday, as it plans to issue Sr4bn ($1.06bn) of tier two sukuk.

The global sukuk market is set to resume growth in 2014 after a mixed 2013 and should exceed $100bn for the third year running, said Standard & Poor’s on Tuesday.

The resilience of Europe’s high yield bond market to recent financial volatility is likely to ensure continued investor demand for the asset class through this week, bankers said on Monday.

Dubai budget airline carrier, Flydubai, is looking to tap the corporate bond market for the first time in early 2015 with sukuk as a potential option, according to its chief financial officer Mukesh Sodani.

With dollar funding again stymied, a banner performance in sterling underscored the UK currency’s increasingly strategic appeal to bond issuers, some bankers argued this week — highlighting a rise of almost £1bn in new issues compared with the same period last year. But others see little more than an opportunistic grab at basis swap arbitrage.

The UK government has appointed law firm Linklaters to act as legal advisor to assist the UK Treasury in preparing for the country's debut sukuk.

January may have been a wash out for Middle East bonds and sukuk issuers as well as the British public, but one of those groups still has every reason to hope that things will improve.

B Communications, the holding company of Israeli telco Bezeq, wants to sell a $775m-equivalent high yield bond in euros and dollars.

Despite emergency rate hikes by India, Turkey and South Africa aimed at stopping the rot that tore through emerging market credit and currencies this week, senior bankers and traders insisted that this was not the beginning of a full blown EM crisis. And with the rise in credit spreads far from catastrophic, a blowout deal for Kuwait Projects Company and a healthy pipeline to look forward to, the evidence seemed to stack up in their favour, at least for now.

The wave of CEEMEA sovereigns tapping the euro market before the volatility of this week was hailed by most as a temporary aberration from the norm. But issuers with large funding needs should take this opportunity to start nurturing this market more carefully and become regular issuers in both dollars and euros in the same way that the more sophisticated western SSA issuers operate.