Italy

Public sector borrowers soaked up huge demand in the euro market on Tuesday including the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, which printed its biggest ever 100 year bond despite offering a yield of less than 1%.

Luigi Nalini SpA, an investment vehicle representing the Nalini family, has sold €64.5m of stock in Carel Industries, the Italian maker of air conditioning and humidifier systems, via an accelerated bookbuild on Monday night.

Italy is at an advanced stage with its green bond framework with a highly anticipated debut deal in the format expected to arrive this year, according to the Italian Treasury.

A senior equity capital markets banker has left Barclays after more than a decade at the UK bank.

Covered bond issuance from Europe’s peripheral regions is likely to be anaemic in 2021, as issuers will continue to rely heavily on far cheaper central bank funding. Covered bond spreads are very tight, but the cost of senior unsecured bonds has come down faster, and deposits have grown.

The Finnish financial sector wants to put the brakes on new measures aimed at completing the Banking Union, arguing that EU member states should move back into a clearly defined process of risk reduction.

Pirelli, the Italian tyres company, has issued its first convertible bond since its re-IPO on the Milan Stock Exchange in 2017, raising €500m.

Italian MPs are threatening to use a vote in parliament this week to derail a recent EU agreement on planned reforms for the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Scepticism about transition bonds has receded, according to Snam, the Italian gas distribution company that is the product’s leading issuer. While some ‘dark green’ investors still do not want to buy its bonds, many others do. One day, the company may officially be able to call its bonds green.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena led a trio of speculative grade Italian banks into the euro bond market this week, as credit investors showed that no issuers were off limit in their increasingly desperate search for yield. Tyler Davies reports.

Sub-investment grade Italian lenders Banco BPM and Illimity Bank were well-supported in the euro bond market on Thursday, as investors showed they were more than happy to look at riskier names in their search for yield.

The resignation of Jean Pierre Mustier as group CEO on Monday night has laid bare deep fissures between the senior management of UniCredit, which has been focused on serving the interests of shareholders, and members of its board, which want to reposition the bank as a servant of the Italian economy.