Loans and High Yield

The date that the UK regulator has set to stop new Libor lending is just over six weeks away but market participants once again sounded the warning bells this week over the readiness of lenders to leave the old benchmark behind.

Kirshlen Moodley, formerly a member of JP Morgan's UK M&A team, has joined BNP Paribas.

Stark Group’s strong performance amid the pandemic is a crucial selling point for investors looking at buying the €1.35bn loan to fund its purchase by CVC, which agreed to buy the firm from Lone Star in January. The group has added an ESG ratchet to the facility, an increasingly common structure this year, with a margin stepdown if it cuts greenhouse gas emissions.

The financing for the Issa brothers and TDR Capital’s buyout of Asda was priced on Wednesday, breaking multiple records in the process and showing that, for the right issuer in the right conditions, the sterling market can shoulder the bulk of a multi-billion LBO package. Owen Sanderson reports.

India’s well-established renewable energy companies have long been known for selling green bonds, but this week showed that new issuers are ready to join the fray — not just with green deals, but also with sustainability-linked transactions. Morgan Davis reports.

Asda has definitively demonstrated the sterling high yield market’s capacity to do size, garnering more than £8bn of orders across the two tranches of its buy-out financing. Investors bemoaning their likely miserable allocations, however, may find some cold comfort in a refi issue from fellow UK supermarket Iceland, announced on Wednesday.

Aedifica, the Belgian healthcare property investment company, has closed its debut US private placement, according to market sources.

The Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, has coupled with private equity firm NBK Capital Partners, anchoring a direct lending fund.

India Toll Roads sold its first dollar bond on Tuesday, becoming just the latest issuer from the country amid an expected surge of supply this year.

Chinese property company Huafa Industrial Co Ltd Zhuhai raised $200m from the sale of a sub-one year note on Tuesday.

CVC’s secondary buyout of building material firm Stark Group will crank leverage back up at the group, following a tough year when previous owner Lone Star battened down the hatches and paid down debt during an initial scramble for liquidity when the coronavirus pandemic struck.

Shurgard, one of Europe’s largest self-storage companies, has returned to the US private placement market for the third time, according to market sources. The company is only the second from Europe to launch a PP deal this year.