Europe

Andreas Dombret, executive board member of Germany’s Bundesbank, last week rejected claims that post-crisis regulation has significantly increased costs for banks and rendered bank lending less profitable.

ICAP Securities & Derivatives Exchange (ISDX) has made two appointments to its board.

Norwegian Air Shuttle (NAS), the low-cost airline, could become the first Nordic borrower to issue this year in the European high yield bond market.

Covered bonds will help Virgin Money achieve its stated aim of optimising funding costs and extending tenor, especially when taking account of its latest Gosforth RMBS, which gave funding that was both short and more costly compared to covered bonds.

Bankinter will begin meeting investors for a sale of additional tier one bonds on Wednesday, while fellow Spaniard Banco Sabadell and Italy’s UBI Banca are also set to issue capital in the next few days.

Citi has named a new head of its EMEA FIG investment banking group, hiring Piers Davison, former EMEA head of banks and UK head of FIG at JP Morgan.

The chance of the United Kingdom voting to leave the European Union has been driving sterling option premiums sharply higher, but so far has not affected the price of risk in the euro. That, say strategists, is likely to change.

The European Central Bank’s (ECB) decision to include insurance companies in its Corporate Sector Purchase Programme (CSPP), helped JP Morgan’s Sfr200m bond on Friday, allowing undersupplied Swiss investors a chance to buy.

The Italian parliament approved a new law earlier this month that is expected to help finance a broad range of assets. Investors of the secured bonds have recourse to the underlying asset pool as well as an unsecured claim against the issuer.

The soft bullet maturity extension currently being considered for introduction into Germany’s Pfandbriefe law would lower the chance of a payment interruption and could mean issuers need to set aside less collateral to achieve the same rating, said Fitch. Soft bullet bonds would also not be subordinate to hard.

Shares in Saga, the UK insurance and holidays group for the over-50s, have risen sharply since the biggest ever block trade in the stock — and the last for its private equity owners — which Numis Securities handled alone on April 21.

Deutsche Bank was left holding 12% of Elis’s stock, worth €225m, after a block trade on the evening of Thursday April 14 that failed to clear.