Europe

Stada has extended the deadline for acceptance of Bain Capital and Cinven’s €4.1bn takeover offer by two weeks and lowered the acceptance threshold from 75% to 67.5% of all outstanding shares for the deal.

Shares in Rocket Internet, the German internet start-up incubator, fell as much as 4% on Thursday morning after Kinnevik, the Swedish investment company, sold the last of its stake, for €218m. The shares closed down 2%.

The debate on clearing euro derivatives showed signs of heating up on Wednesday, when a French regulator speaking at the International Derivatives Expo (IDX) in London insisted that the activity should take place in the eurozone.

Bayer monetised a large stake in Covestro, the plastics company it span off in 2015, on Tuesday night through a simultaneous block trade and exchangeable bond worth a total of €2bn, which were both covered in an hour by more than 100 investors each.

European Securities and Markets Authority chair Steven Maijoor on Wednesday said that any suggestion of further delaying implementation of the Market in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) was almost "fake news", and that the massive transparency legislation would go ahead as planned in January 2018.

Liberty Global’s UPC Holding locked in a coupon of below 4% for a 12 year bond, the longest maturity for a new deal in the European high yield market so far this year.

Tradebe, the Spanish waste reclamation and recycling solutions firm, has signed a €265m green syndicated term loan, a facility that arranger BBVA says is the first of its kind ever signed.

Eurozone issuers crammed into the euro market on Wednesday ahead of a European Central Bank meeting.

Jumbo trades offering juicy spreads were the name of the game in the corporate bond market on Wednesday, with US telecoms company AT&T and car maker Volkswagen raising a combined €10.5bn between them.

European authorities applied the bank recovery and resolution directive (BRRD) for the first time on Wednesday, placing Spain’s Banco Popular into resolution and approving its sale to Santander. The regulatory process, in which additional tier one (AT1) and tier two bonds were wiped out, has far ranging implications for all market participants working on financial debt.

Berlin Hyp (BHH) issued a tightly priced Pfandbrief on Wednesday, drawing strong demand for a rare deal backed by green commercial mortgage assets. At the same time the Mortgage Society of Finland mandated leads for a sub-benchmark transaction.

Corporate bond investors have a bevy of macroeconomic events on their radar screens, with elections and the European Central Bank meeting, but the large piles of cash in their pockets are expected to smooth over any cracks that might appear in the so far solid new issue market.