Norway

A pair of Nordic public sector borrowers showed the strength of green bond market, printing a pair of well received trades, both of which were priced inside the issuers’ conventional bond curves.

Kommunalbanken printed its third ever green bond on Wednesday, using the "extra selling point" of the green factor to pull in an impressive book for the four year deal and pricing it through its curve.

Kommunalbanken, the Norwegian agency, has selected three banks for a Reg S/144A green bond.

Nets, the Nordic payment processing group whose shares have fallen 13% since their IPO three weeks ago, has reassured shareholders that it will not suffer materially from Nordea’s decision to change its mobile payments joint venture in Denmark and Norway.

A flurry of follow-on equity sales this week, mostly block trades, showed that investors still want stock, sometimes at tight discounts, even while three IPOs had to be abandoned.

Norway’s top spot in Nordic high yield annual primary issuance has historically been invulnerable. But with most borrowers linked to the energy sector and oil prices struggling to recover, its reign may be about to change this year.

Gjensidige Forsikring, the second largest shareholder in Norway’s Sparebank 1 SR-Bank, has tonight launched a block trade to sell a 5.7% stake in the bank, worth about Nkr690m (€77m) before any discount.

Rising oil prices are said to be behind the strong reception Norway’s DNB got on Tuesday when it reopened the dollar Reg S market for additional tier one (AT1) paper.

The revival of convertible bond issuance by the traditional issuer base of smaller, riskier companies continued at the end of last week with contrasting deals by Ship Finance International and Recipharm.

Telenor sold $1.5bn of shares in VimpelCom, the Russian telecoms company, this week, in a combined equity placing and exchangeable bond that were well received, despite the Uzbek bribery scandal that engulfed both companies last year.

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Kommunalbanken (KBN) on Tuesday took advantage of Lael Brainard's, a US Federal Reserve governor, dovish comments on US rates from the day before to eliminate any premium paid on its new five year dollar benchmark.