Europe

OP Financial Group has laid out details of how it will use bond proceeds for green projects and businesses. FIG deals with a sustainable flavour have generally been well received this month, but not all of them have succeeded.

One of the three major Portuguese football clubs has announced plans to sell a new corporate bond. Sporting Lisbon is set to refinance its borrowing for a third time, having sold its first issue in 2008. However, the club has been through a particularly troublesome period on and off the pitch.

European Commission officials have played down concerns expressed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over a controversial EC proposal that seeks to revise European oversight of foreign clearing houses. The comments garnered a curt response from a senior CFTC official.

Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB), the largest bank in Slovenia, has fixed the price range for its €734m IPO in London and Ljubljana, after a positive response from investors during pre-marketing.

In this round up, Eastspring Investment Management can now offer onshore investment products to Chinese customers, SWIFT Business Intelligence outlines Australia’s role in renminbi internationalisation, and Industrial Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) gets approval from the European central Bank to set up a subsidiary in Austria.

Find out how far European sovereigns have progressed in their 2018 plans as we reach the end of October.

Investors and regulators in Europe treat a couple of private rating agencies as omniscient — and that is bad for the rest of us.

Some investors are apparently looking for the euro to go global as a counterpoint to the dollar, which is “becoming a political instrument”. A currency that was contrived as a means to bind together a disparate bunch of societies and their economies is surely little other than a political instrument.

The European Central Bank made clear on Thursday that it will not be Italy’s doting aunt to the European Commission’s disciplinarian parent after the latter dumped the sovereign on the naughty step by rejecting its budget plans this week. Some investors warned that while Italy’s problems are contained for now, further antagonism between Rome and the eurozone’s authorities raises the risk of a junk rating for Italy and contagion to other markets.

Ukraine raised $2bn with a dual tranche offering on Thursday, returning to capital markets in benchmark size for the first time in more than a year, fresh from its agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Some Schuldschein investors claim a slew of transactions being shown to lenders have reached their desks only because the arrangers are trying to sell on their own exposure to troubled borrowers. But deal arrangers have reacted forcefully, and said such claims are sheer fantasy. Silas Brown reports.

Looming changes to the way leases are treated are causing a major headache for debt analysts, with some in the market warning that the rules as written are ripe for manipulation by unscrupulous companies. Michael Turner reports.