Europe

Bank Nederlandse Gemeenten on Tuesday achieved big size and a decent price with a €750m tap of a 10 year bond whose original issue had underwhelmed — leading one SSA banker to reference Hollywood by calling the reopening the “Shawshank Redemption”.

The UK government’s white paper on Brexit, presented as a way of moving negotiations forward with the EU, disappointed many in the UK financial services industry. However, the increasing likelihood of no Brexit deal at all means that disappointment doesn't matter — the proposals laid out in the white paper are little more than noise.

Power generation group Contour was in the euro high yield market this week with a two tranche double-B bond refinancing, with the firm looking to join a raft of other issuers that have refinanced despite spreads leaking wider this year.

The Schuldschein market is back to its active self with over 20 borrowers marketing deals. This is sweet vindication for arrangers, who’ve had to deal with concerns after borrowers Steinhoff and Carillion fell from grace at the end of 2017 and start of 2018.

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group came to the market on Tuesday with a senior deal that it originally announced in May. Meanwhile, Investec and Fidelidade were consulting on subordinated deals.

Equity investor sentiment remains fragile as buyers become more bearish on global markets because of heightened economic tensions between the US and China. Some investors see this as the most potent risk to equity markets since the eurozone debt crisis.

National Bank of Canada went to the euro market on Tuesday for funding levels that it would not have been able to match in dollars, joining a string of other North American issuers looking to benefit from cheap financing conditions in the currency.

A holding company owned by Dubai’s Oger Telecom has come to an agreement with all of its lending banks to give control of Turk Telekom to creditors, after months of restructuring talks on a $4.75bn loan.

The government of Slovenia has relaunched the reprivatisation of Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB), the biggest bank in the country, after an attempt to float it in 2017 failed.

French telecoms firm Altice called on the high yield bond and leveraged loan markets with a €4bn cross-border refinancing deal this week, hoping that improved quarterly results would help investors shake off the apprehension they showed for the credit in March.

EQT is merging its hearing aid firm, Sivantos, with Danish peer Widex. The largest leg of its funding, a €2.6bn credit facility, has been launched in the leveraged loan market, which is digesting multi-billion deals again.

The State of North Rhine-Westphalia’s decision to tap into a glut of long end euro demand won the praise of BondMarker voters, as it fell just short of an average score of 8.0.