Loans and High Yield

Philippine fast food operator Jollibee Foods Corp made a quick return to the dollar market on Thursday, attracting investors to its dual-tranche bond despite the impact the coronavirus has had on its business.

Deutsche Bank has appointed Diarmuid Toomey head of its newly created strategic capital markets group, which will combine leveraged finance, structured equity and equity-linked products, according to a memo seen by GlobalCapital.

Warner Music Group issued a dual currency refi on Tuesday and Wednesday, taking advantage of a US Federal Reserve-fuelled market to lock in tighter pricing and a maturity extension. The deal comes hot on the heels of its IPO, planned before the coronavirus pandemic struck but executed only last week.

Canvest Environmental Protection Group Co, a Hong Kong-based waste-to-energy company, has returned to the loan market for a HK$1.97bn ($251.6m) unsecured deal. In an unusual move, the firm will postpone its covenant tests for the first six months. Pan Yue reports.

Hong Kong-listed oil company Hilong Holding pushed back the exchange deadline for its 2020 bond for the fourth time this week, leaving only a weekend between the exchange deadline and the notes’ maturity on Monday.

Chinese real estate developer Zhongliang Holdings Group Co took $250m from a sub-one year bond on Wednesday, prioritising size over price for the deal.

Angus Whelchel, former global head of private capital markets at Barclays, has been hired by US boutique advisory group Moelis & Co to head its private capital markets team.

Heathrow is asking its high yield creditors to waive covenants it expects to breach this year in a return for a new commitment to a minimum cash level, a boost to coupon payments and a cancellation of any dividends, as it grapples with an 81% dive in earnings.

Virgin Media’s rapid-fire refinancing binge continued on Wednesday with a new high yield bond offering, the fifth so far this month, part of what the company says is a “strategy of refinancing ahead of the curve and maximising tenor across all credit silos”. But the refi binge, which has seen more than $2.5bn-equivalent issued this month, has cost the company dearly, as many of the bonds it is terming out are inside their call dates — meaning it must pay the “make-whole” cost to redeem them.

A spate of real estate and government-linked borrowers from Greater China flocked to the dollar bond market on Tuesday.

Chemicals firm Synthomer is marketing a €520m five year non-call two bond to take out the bridge financing for its purchase of US firm Omnova, announced last July and completed in April. The company’s last outing in high yield ended in failure in 2018, and some bond buyers see chemicals as a cyclical sector to avoid, but market conditions are strong following the US Federal Reserve's opening of individual bond purchases overnight.

A third of the top 50 corporate bond issuers are among companies that investors have named and shamed for not disclosing adequately through the CDP reporting platform about the environmental risks they face as bondholders grow more engaged alongside shareholders in pushing for this information.