Loans and High Yield

BNP Paribas has provided term loans to Altice Europe, whose founder Patrick Drahi has offered to buy €2.5bn of the shares he doesn't already own to take the French telecoms group private.

Philippine real estate company Filinvest Development Corp raised $200m from a five year bond on Thursday.

Chinese property developer Xinyuan Real Estate Co, whose outstanding bonds have suffered because of the Covid pandemic, opted for size over price for its $300m return this week.

The European Central Bank is overstepping the mark with its investment grade corporate bond buying and must start easing off, or it risks detaching the market from economic reality, market participants said this week. Mike Turner reports.

Ford, the US car maker, offered investment grade bond investors a chance to dip into high yield on Tuesday. And its rival, Nissan Motor, is lining up a seven tranche behemoth bond issue that will create a euro curve out to eight years.

Issuance in Europe’s high grade corporate market trended towards high beta names this week, with a spate of deals from riskier names, including the first outing for German fallen angel ZF Freidrichshafen since its downgrade.

Virgin Media started the autumn session in European leveraged finance in style with a five part offering to raise the cash for its joint venture with Telefónica’s O2 unit. The deal underscores how far capital markets have come since the dark days of April, when the £30bn ($38.9bn) mega merger was backed by an investment grade loan to insulate the tie-up from the effects of a prolonged downturn in leveraged credit, reports Owen Sanderson.

A year on from the closure of its flow equity trading business, Deutsche Bank’s investment bank is back in a bullish mood after performing well during the first stage of the coronavirus crisis.

KKR-owned vending machine company Selecta was one of the first companies to have its owner inject super-senior ‘priming’ debt once the Covid crisis hit, pushing bondholders down the capital structure. But in its restructuring package laid out on Tuesday, KKR reversed this aggressive move, offering a creditor-friendly proposal that sent the bonds up 11 points.

Cabot Credit Management has launched a €300m refinancing following the reorganisation of its corporate structure to combine its balance sheet with its parent Encore Capital and boost the group’s financial firepower.

The European syndicated loan market’s transition from Libor to risk-free rates is gathering pace, with market participants starting to offer a much clearer view on the technicalities that a world without Libor will look like for lending.

German travel company Tui’s bondholders have agreed to suspend limits on the debt the company can incur, opening the door to a rescue loan from KfW and a convertible bond injection from the German government's economic stability fund.