UK Sovereign

Two UK companies completed cash-box placings on Wednesday, and both found plenty of demand. Essentra, which makes small components and packaging products, raised £168.8m of new capital, while Workspace Group, the provider of serviced offices in London, raised £96.5m.

Virgin Money, the UK challenger bank backed by Richard Branson and Wilbur Ross, succeeded in pricing its IPO today, though at the bottom of the price range.

British oil and gas company BG Group issued €775m eight and €800m 15 year bonds on Wednesday, in a week of strong issuance of European investment grade corporate bonds.

Alliance Automotive has issued a two tranche bond to fund the French-UK car parts distributor’s buyout in August by Blackstone and the company's founders from Weinberg Capital Partners.

Votes are rolling in to decide this year’s winners of the GlobalCapital Syndicated Loans and Leveraged Finance Awards. There is still time to complete the poll, but the deadline is fast approaching.

A veteran of funding and hybrid capital at Lloyds Banking Group has switched to the investment side, taking the reins of the group's portfolio of assets to ensure it is in compliance with the liquidity coverage ratio.

Mortgage Advice Bureau, the UK mortgage broker network, priced its IPO on Aim on Tuesday morning at 160p a share, valuing the company at £80.8m.

Jefferies traded on Tuesday evening a block of 12.5m shares in Just Eat, the UK-based online takeaway food ordering service that floated in London in April for £360m.

UniCredit has hired a new head of high yield syndicate from a private equity firm.

Exotix, a frontier, emerging market and illiquid debt merchant bank, has hired Jakob Christensen as a director and senior economist.

For anyone who works outside the rarefied world of financial markets, Markit might sound like something an errant tomcat gets up to. But after listing his company for $1.5bn on Nasdaq in June just eleven years after founding it in his garden, CEO Lance Uggla is unlikely to be suffering much angst about his choice of name.

Serco, the UK outsourcing group, had a horrible day in the stockmarket on Monday, as its shares plummeted by 32% after it announced £1.5bn of impairment charges and a £550m rights issue. After that, the shares remained stable for the next three days.