Germany

A shift in the euro/dollar basis swap means more euro funders could look at dollars, according to SSA bankers. Upcoming Asian holidays are likely to jumbo deals, but there could be room for smaller, cheaper names — with one of those issuers getting a rampant reception this week.

Guarantor: Federal State of North Rhine‑Westphalia

When UK telecoms company Vodafone announced in May that it had agreed to buy some of US rival Liberty Global’s European operations, it said it would use existing cash, €3bn of mandatorily convertible bonds and new debt, including hybrid bonds to fund the €18.4bn acquisition. On Wednesday, Vodafone sold the hybrid bonds, using four different tenors in three currencies. Nigel Owen reports.

German publishing company Bertelsmann returned to the euro corporate bond market on Tuesday to re-market a deal it had pulled in May after setting the spread. This time the issuer priced the transaction at what was seen as a more realistic spread, but the high premium was in part due to the illiquidity of the secondary curve.

The chair of the influential UK Treasury select committee, Nicky Morgan, told a conference of derivatives bankers, lawyers and regulators, that despite the threat of “serious problems” for cross-border derivatives contracts in a Brexit no-deal scenario, she was “reasonably confident that a no deal scenario will not cause the whole sector to fall over”.

NRW.Bank nipped in ahead of this week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting to tap keen investor interest in dollars on Wednesday, pricing a deal that on-looking bankers said was flat to its curve.

Revised price ranges have been set on the flotations of Funding Circle and SIG Combibloc as investors continue to support the crop of new European listings coming to market.

ADO Properties is seeking to raise Schuldschein debt, a month after shelving a eight year public bond after a high profile bribery case in Israel implicated its chairman.

NRW.Bank hit screens on Tuesday for its first dollar benchmark of the year, ahead of what will be a closely watched Federal Open Market Committee meeting on Wednesday.

The European Central Bank has reduced the maximum size of its orders in the primary covered bond market from 30% to 10%, based on the evidence of a €500m 10 year social Pfandbrief issued on Tuesday by Deutsche Kreditbank (DKB).

German publishing company Bertelsmann returned to the euro corporate bond market on Tuesday to remarket a deal it had pulled in May after setting the spread. This time the issuer priced the transaction, but it had to pay a much larger new issue premium than others have done on recent deals.

RAG-Stiftung, the German foundation created in 2007 to support the discontinuation of the country’s coal mines, opted to a block trade alongside an exchangeable bond to sell a 7% stake in Evonik Industries, the German speciality chemicals company, for €1bn.