Pre-migration untagged articles

French distiller Pernod Ricard is offering a 36% discount to Tuesday’s closing price in its Eu1bn rights issue, a much lower markdown compared to many recent deals. Pernod set the terms for the share offer on Wednesday, a day after one of its larger shareholders, Japanese brewer Kirin, announced the transfer of its stake to Pernod’s founding family. Is the discount deep enough for current volatile stock markets? Read EuroWeek on Friday.

Financing has closed for the first project to use the UK Treasury’s newly created £2bn Infrastructure Finance Unit, designed to make up for shortfalls of private debt on infrastructure deals. The IFU has contributed £120m to the Greater Manchester Waste PFI, which has also secured £245m in funding from Bank of Ireland, BBVA, Lloyds Banking Group and SMBC. Will the facility unlock private funding? Read EuroWeek on Friday and more about the deal later today at www.euroweek.com/loans

Dealers of private EMTNs: Non-syndicated deals excluding financial repackaged SPVs, self-led deals and issues with a term of less than 365 days

The World Bank returned to the Swiss franc market on Monday for the first time since January 1998 as triple-A issuers found conditions in the currency propitious.

Landesbank Baden-Württemberg and Caisse de Refinancement de l’Habitat took advantage of supportive market conditions to launch sizeable taps of recent jumbo covered bonds this week, although no new benchmarks emerged.

Bâloise-Holding launched a Sfr500m April 2013 bond at 265bp over swaps on Tuesday and leads Credit Suisse, UBS and Zürcher Kantonalbank were taken aback by the level of demand.

As public market investors rediscovered their appetite for non-government guaranteed bank notes this week, enquiry for paper of this type in the private placement market also increased. The relative cost of the two forms of issuance is also edging closer for issuers it seems.

Banks found plenty of demand in the European commercial paper market this week with investors warming to unguaranteed issuance after a period of wariness of this type of paper, according to dealers.

Moody’s has requested suggestions regarding proposed revisions to its modelling parameters for market value CDOs backed by corporate debt. The changes, if implemented, would mean an immediate downgrade of all Aaa rated tranches to Aa1 and putting them on review for possible further downgrades. Moody’s believes CDOs with market value triggers may not be able to attain a triple-A rating.

Speculative grade corporate default rates in Europe increased sharply in the first quarter of this year compared to the end of 2008, according to a report by Moody’s this week which confirms fears that the rise in defaults is set to accelerate in 2009.

The $485 million City of Worcester (Mass.) Retirement System is increasing its bank loan and high-yield allocations, as the areas have become attractive following market dislocation.

The $45 billion Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System has decided to raise its allocation to opportunistic credit/high-yield strategies to 9% from 5%.