Loans and High Yield

The Ministry of Finance of the Lao PDR is inviting banks to join a €135m five year loan that Credit Suisse pre-funded in June.

India’s PNB Housing Finance is breaking a five-year absence from the loan market, launching a new $75m deal into syndication.

Financing a dirty industry to clean up serves a different purpose to keeping a portfolio pure, and appeals to investors with different theories about the economy and the world. It's time for markets to start making the distinction.

Demire, a German real estate company, issued €600m of unsecured senior notes on Monday, reducing its average financing costs by 90bp. Investors raised some concerns over the deteriorating German economy and big private equity sponsor Apollo but they lapped up the issue nonetheless.

HSBC is reorganising its corporate finance coverage and sending the co-head of the business, Peter Enns, to Asia as part of a global revamp under Greg Guyett, the bank’s new global banking boss.

MUFG has hired a new head of its derivatives solutions group in EMEA from HSBC.

Wind Hellas, the Greek telecoms firm owned by GoldenTree and Cyrus Capital Partners, announced a new €500m 2024 bond on Tuesday to push out its maturities and lock in cash, ahead of Greece’s 5G auction. The deal}s terms allow Wind Hellas to pay a special dividend after selling its mobile phone towers.

Teekay Shuttle Tankers has mandated a $150m “green bond” to fund new oil tankers built to the firm’s “e-shuttle” standards. The deal raises questions about the logic of using green-branded debt instruments to fund fossil fuel extraction.

Merlin Entertainments, the UK-listed theme park operator, has launched a £2.4bn ($2.96bn) loan syndication to back its £5.9bn buyout by a private equity consortium. It is expected to add bonds to the financing package.

Virgin Media launched a refinancing of its $3.4bn senior secured term loan B, with a combined offering across sterling bonds, and euro and dollar loans. The move comes two weeks after Swiss telco Salt proved that bonds could price meaningfully tighter than leveraged loans for the right issuer, and Virgin also saw a strong result.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is looking at shaking up how UCITS funds manage liquidity, following the high profile pressures at Woodford. Under proposals being explored, bond and equities funds might face stress testing, and the definition of an illiquid asset could change.

Mexican payroll lender Crédito Real brought Latin American high yield corporate issuance back to the European bond markets for the first time in five years last week, in a deal that fed euro buyers’ hunger for new names.