Europe

Ahead of what is expected to be a long, dry summer in the primary covered bond market, Korean Housing Finance Corporation (KHFC) and Caffil were out on Wednesday with €1bn new issues.

James Marriott is joining Wells Fargo in a senior debt capital markets role this autumn after he resigned from NatWest Markets, where he was head of DCM and advisory for financial institutions and sovereigns, supranationals and agencies.

Swiss Re sold a 6.6% stake in UK insurance services company Phoenix Group on Tuesday, raising £437m for the seller.

Katharina Utermöhl, senior economist for Europe at Allianz, has called for a radical rethinking of the European Union’s approach to Capital Markets Union, saying that past attempts to harmonise rules and regulations across member states have “failed, and we should get over that”.

Denmark’s Systemic Risk Council is calling on the government to reactivate countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB) requirements for banks, as the country's economic recovery gathers pace and risks begin to build up in the residential mortgage market.

Spain and Portugal are reducing the sizes of their funding programmes for this year, the countries’ respective heads of debt management operations said during appearances on a panel at the Global Borrowers and Bond Investors Forum 2021 on Tuesday.

This week, Spanish refrigerated trucking company Primafrio and Russian goldminer Nordgold postponed their respective IPOs, on the Spanish and London Stock Exchanges in hopes of better market conditions in the future. These delays are just the latest casualties of Europe’s turbulent IPO market.

The Republic of Slovenia was selling its third bond of the year on Wednesday — a debut sustainability offering. The sovereign, which many investors categorise alongside western European investment grade sovereigns, was set to price the deal tight.

Polyester producer Sasa has placed the first convertible bond by a Turkish listed issuer, raising €200m, as the asset class continues to grow in popularity.

Agence France Trésor (AFT), the French sovereign debt office, has hired Antoine Mannevy as a debt market operations dealer.

The green dim sum bond market saw a small jump in action on Tuesday, with high yield issuer Zhenro Properties Group selling a short-dated deal and German development bank KfW reopening one of its existing notes.

The European initial public offering market has been difficult for months, but new listings are still being brought to market with little regard for whether investors want to buy them. Instead of trying to ram deals through to satisfy a pre-arranged timeline, banks should be advising their clients to delay listings that don’t work in these conditions.