Europe

This week's funding scorecard looks at the progress French agencies have made in their funding programmes at the end of May

Agence France Locale is set to sell its first ever sustainability bond, setting up virtual meetings with investors this week. Another debut issuer, NRW.Bank, has just announced details of its inaugural social bond.

Emerging market investors are anticipating a wave of corporate and FIG issuance from across the CEEMEA region, which they say will be welcomed with open arms. Russian petrochemical company Sibur is the latest such borrower looking to being a new bond, hosting investor calls on Monday.

Agence Française de Développement hit the market twice this week, taking advantage of the absence of competing supply to pick up cash in euros and dollars. Thibaut Makarovsky, head of funding and market operations at the agency, discussed the deals with GlobalCapital.

Citi has created a cross-border and public sector solutions (XPS) team, which will be headed by Valentina Antill globally, with Abhishek Kapur taking charge of Asia Pacific.

Each week, Keeping Tabs brings you the very best of what we in the GlobalCapital newsroom have found most useful, interesting and informative from around the web. This week: remote working challenges and opportunities, rethinking discrimination in economics, and how volatility strategies fell apart in the market crash.

Aston Martin, the UK car maker returned to equity markets on Friday morning to raise yet more equity capital after completing a rights issue in April. The company has sold a stake worth 19.9% of its share capital to allow a new management team to rebuild the company.

The Federal Reserve has come under fire for failing to oblige banks to stop paying dividends at a time of extreme economic uncertainty. The results of its latest stress test showed this week that a quarter of US banks could approach their minimum capital ratios if the coronavirus pandemic leads to a double-dip recession.

Just one week after selling $1.25bn of bonds, Belarus’s yield curve has widened as protests hit the country.

Issuers are struggling to obtain the necessary internal approvals to issue covered bonds, given how expensive the instruments are compared to the European Central Bank's Targeted Longer Term Refinancing Operations (TLTRO III).

The European Commission has split a new set of initiatives to progress the Capital Markets Union into three sections based around companies' recovery and growth, individuals' savings, and the single market for capital, according to an internal working document obtained by GlobalCapital.

Asif Sherani and Souhail Mahjour are taking on additional responsibilities in HSBC’s debt capital markets syndicate team.