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Despite continental Europe-wide holidays and Golden Week in Japan, underwriters are cramming a surprising amount of business into next week. Roadshows are in abundance and the new issue calendar looks busy, especially in euros. This week the credit market digested the Eu6.5bn equivalent issue RWE launched last Friday (April 19), which included the largest ever sterling offering, of £1.55bn. It was priced just before E.On named ABN Amro, Barclays, DrKW and Goldman Sachs as leads for its intermediate and long dated euro and sterling bonds worth between Eu5 and Eu7bn.

Arranger HSBC will close the books for Davis Services' £425m acquisition facility today (Friday). Funds will be used to buy Denmark's textile services group, Sophus Berendson.

Dollar swap spreads compressed once more this week. By yesterday (Thursday) afternoon the five year spread had come in to around 52.5bp over Treasuries while the 10 year was at 58bp over Treasuries. These prices were off the lows of the week, but represented a decline of another 4bp or so over the past seven days. The underlying strength of the Treasury market this week exerted downward pressure on swap spreads. Over the past couple of weeks, the general assessment of the economic trajectory over the next few months and the likely response of the Federal Reserve has undergone a dramatic reappraisal. Recent economic data releases have been ambiguous at best, while the stock market has endured some serious losses. A series of European and US firms have announced poor earning figures over the last few weeks.

Hrvatska Banka za Ovnovu i Ratvitak (HBOR) is due to award the mandate to arrange its $60m-$100m three to five year credit early next week. ING and RZB are close to the deal.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein has merged its equity and debt functions into a combined capital markets business line, to be headed by Andrew Pisker. Pisker already sits on the executive board, reporting to chairman and CEO Leonhard Fischer. In early March Dresdner set up a task force, chaired by Pisker, to look at potential areas of co-operation between the equity and debt divisions. This week's announcement reflects that committee's report. ""A number of firms have looked into integrating their debt and equity businesses," Pisker told EuroWeek, "but to our knowledge, none have actually fully merged the two."

The credit problems that have pervaded US arbitrage collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) for the last two years are beginning to eat into the European market. Fitch this week downgraded the three lowest rated tranches of Eurostar I CDO, a Eu327m deal managed by DWS Finanz-Service, a subsidiary of Deutsche Asset Management.

The troubled Scottish fund management group, Edinburgh Fund Managers, has appointed Anne Richards as its chief investment officer. The fund manager has recruited Richards from Merrill Lynch Investment Managers where she was managing director of the Alpha team, managing $15bn of funds for large segregated pension funds, charities and unit trusts.

The $50m one year facility for African Export Import Bank (Afrexim) has been launched into general syndication. Arrangers are WestLB, KBC, Natexis Banques Populaires, RZB, Standard Chartered and WGZ.

Rating: Baa2/BBB+ Amount: Eu500m

Credit Suisse First Boston and Royal Bank of Scotland have still not closed senior syndication of the $455m multi-tranche facility for Enodis. The deal was launched on March 20.

Ericsson's shares lost nearly 30% of their value this week after the telco announced plans to launch a Skr30bn (Eu3.25bn) rights issue. This will be the first major TMT balance sheet restructuring deal to take place in 2002, following jumbo issues in 2001 from British Telecom, KPN and Sonera. Ericsson's offering will be led by Citigroup/SSSB, Enskilda Securities, Handelsbanken Securities, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.