Italy

Italy enticed investors out the curve on Tuesday with its first ever 20 year euro benchmark, offering a pick-up of around 40bp over where its 15 year benchmark — a more traditional pricing point for the sovereign — was trading in secondaries.

Banca Popolare di Vicenza’s mainly retail shareholders will be left owning just 0.66% of the bank if its €1.5bn IPO is priced at the bottom end of the price range. That the IPO and capital increase would be highly dilutive had been clear for some time, but the publication of the price range today makes it possible to put numbers on this for the first time.

The first task of the Fondo Atlante, the Italian bank rescue fund that politicians and financial leaders have put together over the past few weeks, moved a step closer to achievement today, with the announcement that it will sub-underwrite the IPO of Banca Popolare di Vicenza — as long as regulators agree.

Italy’s strongest banks are to contribute to a fund that will back-stop the capital raises of weaker lenders, in a deal brokered by the government that has drawn scepticism from many investors, but optimism from others. Tom Porter reports.

Italy doesn’t mince its words on troubled assets. Loans in danger of becoming non-performing are dubbed ‘incagli’, which means ‘run aground’. When they become the ‘NPLs’ we hear so much about, they are ‘sofferenze’, which simply means suffering.

When it comes to Italian banks, pessimists are not in short supply. Indeed, to be bullish on this sector could be considered contrarian, or even foolhardy, given its parlous state. Asset quality is the overriding problem — Italy’s banks have €360bn of non-performing loans on their balance sheets, about a third of the eurozone’s total.

Buzzi Unicem, the Italian cement and concrete group, is planning a European-targeted bond issue to tackle €510m of debt maturities this year.

FIG bond investors had a little more to go at on Wednesday after a slow start to the week, while the market is finding it hard to decide whether a new recapitalisation fund for Italy’s banks is a good thing or not.

Banca Popolare di Vicenza on Thursday launched premarketing for its €1.5bn IPO and capital increase, after a period of uncertainty when UniCredit, the underwriter, had cast doubt on whether it could be completed by the end of April deadline.

Portugal brought a dual tranche syndicated tap this week, in what some bankers felt was a disappointment amid a busy market where every other deal went well — but the leads were quick to defend the trade.

Eni issued a €400m convertible bond on Wednesday that had to be reduced in size and repriced at worse terms for the issuer. The deal was an important test of whether there is still vigour in the spate of equity-neutral convertible bonds following the European Central Bank's unleashing of quantitative easing on the corporate bond market on March 10.

Technogym, the Italian company that is one of the world’s leading makers of gym equipment, launched an IPO on Monday, on the same day that its private equity backer Arle Capital also set out to float Parques Reunidos in Spain (see Syndicated Loans section).