Europe

Jonathan Moulds, a banking veteran who worked in board-level jobs at Barclays and Merrill Lynch International, is to become chair of Litigation Capital Management.

SNCF Réseau took advantage of a move in swap spreads and a favourable euro/dollar basis swap to sell its third dollar benchmark on Friday, ahead of what SSA bankers say will be a busy week of supply in the currency. Nordic agencies are among the issuers expected to be come to the dollar market next week.

This week's funding scorecard looks at the progress French agencies have made in their funding programmes so far this year.

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Telefónica, the Spanish telecoms group with €55bn of debt, came to the euro market on Tuesday to refinance two of its hybrid capital bonds. It launched a tender offer for the pair, which now total €1.3bn, and a hybrid new issue to replace them, tacking on opportunistically a 10 year senior bond issue.

Achmea, the Dutch insurance holding company, has signed a €1bn sustainability-linked refinancing loan, in what one bank said was the first deal of its kind in the country's insurance sector.

Europe’s corporate bond market could be read two ways this week. On one hand, conditions were superb for issuers — many large deals were brought and spreads were usually rammed tighter by 20bp or even 30bp during bookbuild, to fine or negligible new issue premiums.

Saint-Gobain, the French building materials company, came in the second, weaker half of a very busy week in the European corporate bond new issue market. But although its €1.5bn of five and 12 year bonds were one of the deals rival bankers said had found cooler demand, those close to the deal insisted it had gone well.

Whether Vodafone’s £3.44bn issue of two and three year mandatorily convertible bonds on Tuesday this week ends up being judged a corporate finance success for the company may take time to discover. But it is already clear it was a great hit with investors — much more so than the first time Vodafone issued the structure in 2016.

Vodafone’s £3.4bn mandatorily convertible bond with share buyback language, sold to huge demand this week, may have created a new financial product. Certainly it will set off a maelstrom of analysis and pitching to clients, as banks seek other companies willing to try this daring structure. Jon Hay and Aidan Gregory report.

Markets have rallied in Europe and the US so far this year across equities and credit, but participants are feeling gloomy about the prospects for investment banks' revenues in the forthcoming first quarter results.

The root of arbitrage is the same thing being priced differently in two markets. As markets have got bigger and more sophisticated, arbitrage has become harder to find.