Europe

Santander UK has beaten a path that could become well trodden by European banks in the next two years, printing a holdco senior unsecured deal in the Tokyo Pro-Bond market as it looks to broaden its investor base for issuing loss absorbing debt.

Lloyds Bank's shares rose over 2% on Thursday after the Court of Appeal ruled a series of high coupon enhanced capital notes (ECNs) sold to retail investors in 2009 had become useless for future UK stress tests and could be called at par.

European regulators have dealt a blow to credit default swap investors who are seeking legal reparations against banks on charges of collusion, after the European Commission ditched its long-running antitrust investigation of 13 major banks, citing insufficient evidence.

Finnish retail and property company Stockmann issued an €85m hybrid bond on Thursday, after announcing the deal on Tuesday.

Repsol, the Spanish oil producer, issued a €600m five year 2.125% bond on Wednesday, in a torrid week for commodity markets, to finance a buyback of some Talisman Energy bonds.

Royal Bank of Scotland has put Anne Gebuhrer and Tim Skeet, both managing directors in FIG DCM, at risk of redundancy, adding their names to a list of FIG and corporate bankers the UK bank has recently let go.

Legrand, the French electrical fittings manufacturer, issued a €300m bond on Wednesday, carving out a successful trade in the face of frantic activity.

Abengoa avoided triggering a bankruptcy credit event on Tuesday by only a single word change in legal documentation after ISDA spent more than a week boggling over Spanish laws and its own credit derivative definitions. But as GlobalCapital went to press, the firm looked to be on the brink of triggering a failure to pay credit event instead, having acknowledged it had missed commercial paper repayments. Dan Alderson reports.

Eurofins Scientific, the French laboratory testing company, tried and failed to raise €339m of new capital in an overnight block trade on Wednesday night, despite the very strong recent performance of its shares.

Westpac

Since the 2008 financial crisis, for a number of years subdued activity in IPOs was believed to be the norm on Italian exchanges. Yet since 2014, political and economic trends are changing the script — prompting a boom in Italian IPO activity, according to Stefania Godoli, global head of equity capital markets at UniCredit.

Intesa Sanpaolo issued a €1.25bn 10 year covered bond on Wednesday, a transaction that did not initially seem to be an obvious trade, but which in the end proved very successful.