Europe

The City of Paris is set to follow deals from the European Stability Mechanism and SNCF Réseau last week by bringing a trade at the long end of the euro curve.

Trafigura, the commodity trading company, cut the margin of its European loan in its latest refinancing to the lowest level since before the global financial crisis, but also received fewer commitments.

The Spanish engineering and green energy firm Abengoa is set to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for its US affiliates, after 75% of its lenders signed a standstill agreement.

The Bank of England has raised its countercyclical buffer in response to the UK’s looming European Union referendum, as it tries to ensure banks will continue to lend in the event of a ‘Brexit’ vote.

Banco Popolare and Banca Popolare di Milano will merge to form Italy’s third largest bank by assets, having been granted permission by the European Central Bank on Wednesday evening. The deal may trigger further consolidation in Italy, and is could be a crucial step towards the modernisation of the country’s fragmented banking sector.

Dutch lender ABN Amro returned to the Singapore dollar bond market for the first time since 2012, raising S$450m ($331m) with a tier two offering.

Cairn Homes, the Irish housebuilder that floated in London for €440m last June, completed its second post-IPO capital raising this week, raising €175m to buy further land for development.

Two equity block trades or rapid sales were completed successfully in Europe on Monday night.

After a barren year of sterling bond issuance from international borrowers, a dry patch that some thought would last until the Brexit referendum in June, an Australian company finally broke the silence on Wednesday.

Heightened talk around Brexit is adding to the pressure on UK credit spreads and, combined with European Central Bank promises of an investment grade corporate bond purchase programme, causing British names to underperform their eurozone peers. But market participants say this presents a buying opportunity as a reversal could follow.

Standard & Poor’s astonished the equity-linked bond market on Wednesday evening by stripping the equity credit from Vodafone’s £2.9bn mandatory convertibles, issued in February, only a month after assigning the credit. The change knocks away one advantage of the deal for Vodafone and may damage banks’ hopes of replicating it.

BNP Paribas took advantage of a lull in issuance this week to launch a heavily oversubscribed dollar additional tier one transaction, following in the footsteps of UBS, which reopened the market with a blowout last Monday.