France

Eranove, an electricity and water company that operates in several west African countries, has published its document de base for a Paris IPO that will raise €200m of new capital and may also involve a secondary selldown.

The success of the Euro private placement market is clear from its internationalisation and the growth in issuance by smaller companies, said market participants at an industry gathering on Tuesday. But in the next stage of the market’s evolution, it will have to tackle the issues that come with deals of lower credit quality.—

Private placement specialists are starting to think about convergence between the France-based Euro PP market and Germany’s Schuldschein, according to speakers at Rencontres Euro PP, an industry gathering in Paris on Tuesday.

Euros issuance could be focused on the shorter end of the curve in the coming months, bankers said, given the considerable risks of investing in a longer dated bond at a time at which the European Central Bank's interest rates sit at record lows.

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.

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.

Unédic

SNCF Réseau became the second SSA issuer of the week to target the long end of the euro curve, printing a €500m May 2037 on Wednesday.

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

Zodiac Aerospace, the French aeroplane seat maker, has sold a seven year Euro private placement to refinance an older Euro PP and the first instalment of a Schuldschein, both issued in 2013.

The head of equity-linked bonds at Bank of America Merrill Lynch has resigned from the firm.