Europe

Europe’s corporate bond new issue market is distinctly subdued as Easter Week begins. Investors, issuers and banks alike feel the market could do with a gap to digest the very heavy issuance earlier this month. This week brought two liability management deals, one with a new issue.

A single SSA benchmark is all bankers expect to emerge this week, as the market hunkers down to await the second quarter.

The IPO of Gategroup, the Swiss airline catering company, has been cancelled after market conditions led to a 'gap in valuations' between the issuer and buyers.

The pipeline of high yield deals from German real estate borrowers is finally building up after more than two years of work with underwriters and lawyers. A new €300m bond from Corestate should pave the way for more players to shift their funding from bank loans to bonds, said market participants.

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John Laing Group, the UK infrastructure projects company, has closed its £210m ($295.74m) rights issue after the deal attracted substantial interest.

Melrose’s £7bn-plus hostile takeover bid for UK engineering company GKN has entered its final week, with the industrial conglomerate making another case to GKN’s shareholders before Thursday’s deadline.

JD Sports, the UK casualwear company, is set to break into the US market by buying Finish Line for around $558m. The acquisition will be financed in the loan market.

Primary activity is likely to improve after the Easter break but bankers are telling issuers that covered bond new issue premiums are ‘a small price to pay’ in the context of much larger senior unsecured new issue concessions.

Turkish participation banks Albaraka Türk and Vakif Katilim have kicked off the global syndication of two murabaha facilities.

Russia's State Transport Leasing Company (STLC) could return to the dollar market bond as early as this week, according to bankers on the deal.

Financial institutions bond bankers have said that they would happily see a slowdown in the pace of new bond supply, which has been weighing heavily on secondary valuations in recent weeks.