Europe

Swiss luxury goods company Richemont made its debut in the corporate bond market on Thursday with a jumbo triple tranche offering. And Goldman Sachs leapt in the league tables by solely running the €3.75bn deal.

Deutsche Hypo followed other German lenders into the UK market to price its first covered bond in sterling on Thursday. The deal was priced just 7bp inside where SEB issued an unsecured FRN on the same day.

PKO Bank Hipoteczny may not have attracted the most overall demand in Thursday’s packed issuance window, but its covered bond was notable for having the highest spread and strongest subscription ratio of the five deals in the market.

IPO issuers are setting conservative valuations on deals to ease execution and aid aftermarket trading after a difficult start to the year led to a rethink of strategies.

Lloyds issued its first euro covered bond in almost two years on Thursday, helping to assuage Brexit concerns by pricing the €1bn seven year with a positive spread to mid-swaps.

Swedish lender SEB was looking for sterling funding on Thursday, after a clutch of banks issued bonds in the currency on Wednesday. But amid bonds underperforming in the secondary market, the bank was unable to grow the order book much beyond the deal size of £250m.

ING Groep issued two tranches of tier two debt in euros and dollars on Thursday, coughing up premium to print the third tier two of the week.

BNP Paribas Fortis managed to attract decent demand for its €750m 10 year covered bond this week, despite a plethora of competing issuance scaling back of interest from the Eurosystem, and an increasingly picky and nervous investor base demanding ‘last looks’ in book building.

Vonovia, the German housing company, issued €2.1bn of bonds on Thursday to finance its €5.2bn acquisition of Austrian peer Buwog, which was announced in December.

WL Bank was unable to secure much private demand for a €500m 10 year on Thursday, yet managed to get over the finishing line with much some help from the Eurosystem, though it was less than might have been expected.

A top US derivatives regulator on Wednesday went into battle against his European counterparts over their new proposal that will increase the stringency of the EU’s oversight of foreign clearing houses.

Tullow Oil, the group based in London that has most of its operations in Africa, was on course to print its new high yield bond in the 7% area this week. It was attracting interest from pension funds in need of assets with high returns, according to sources.