Europe

Strix Group, the UK maker of kettle safety components, has successfully concluded its £190m IPO on London’s Alternative Investment Market.

Jozef Prokes, fixed income portfolio manager at BlackRock talks to GlobalCapital about the outlook for yields, swaps and the relationship between covered bonds and senior spreads.

Senior bonds issued by Vivat, the Dutch insurer, attracted buying interest this week following fresh reports about the firm’s China-based parent company.

Limacorporate, the Italian maker of orthopaedic implants, is set to keep the euro high yield new issue market in motion with a floating rate bond deal, which unusually will be used to repay the loans that funded its buyout by EQT from Ardian.

Turkey’s smaller financial institutions – Yapi Kredi Finansal Kiralama, the leasing arm of Yapi Kredi, and Alternatif Bank (Abank) – have come to the loan market with higher pricing than their bigger bank counterparts.

Sabine Lautenschläger, vice-chair of the supervisory board of the European Central Bank (ECB), has said that deregulating the financial system would be a "big mistake".

China plans to increase a limit on foreign equity investors, the PBoC renews a currency swap line with Switzerland, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says the renminbi is broadly moving in line with fundamentals.

CVC has agreed a €4.44.4bn sale of its German metering and energy business Ista to Cheung Kong Property Holdings, founded and chaired by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, in one of the biggest private equity deals of the year.

Arnaud-Guilhem Lamy, portfolio manager and head of covered bonds at BNP Paribas Asset Management, speaks to GlobalCapital about the outlook for covered bond spreads, monetary policy and the market’s interaction with senior preferred and non-preferred.

Bank Saint Petersburg, the Russian regional retail bank, has successfully priced a Rb3.2bn ($53m) equity capital increase, through a multi-day bookbuild that finished on Friday.

Gates Global delisted its 5.75% 2022 bonds from the Luxembourg Stock Exchange this month, and relisted them immediately on the former Channel Islands Stock Exchange, now rebranded The International Stock Exchange (TISE). The move was likely a response to Europe’s Market Abuse Regulation, which has driven some high yield issuers to the non-EU exchange.

The renminbi’s usage as a global payment currency goes up, BlackRock says full bond index inclusion will drive capital inflows into Chinese fixed income, and foreign ownership of Chinese bonds and equities rise.