UK Sovereign

Will Smiley, former co-head of ECM syndicate for Asia Pacific ex Japan at Goldman Sachs, has relocated to the bank’s London office.

Buy- and sellside firms with bilateral arrangements with exchanges may find time and resources are under pressure from the migration of Liffe UK derivative products to ICE Futures Europe, which started on Monday and will continue through to mid-November.

Monday was a soft day for equities and credit spreads, but BP had little if any hesitation in launching its second large euro bond of the year. The UK oil company’s deal was the eighth big dual tranche deal in euros since BMW set the fashion on August 26.

British bank Aldermore, which lends to SMEs and homeowners, is set to become the third of a run of challenger banks from the country as it launched its IPO on Monday.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has lost a senior emerging markets DCM banker.

Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ has lost a senior banker from its loan syndication business in London.

Blog thought most bankers working in the sovereign debt market would have been rejoicing as the No votes piled up when the results from the Scottish independence came in the wee small hours of Friday morning. After all, trying to explain the new constitutional setup of Scotland and the rest of the UK to overseas investors would be pretty difficult, especially considering none of the politicians seemed to know what it was supposed to look like either. Not to mention trying to work out which entity exactly would be on the hook for different parts of the UK’s debt pile.

Scotland’s rejection of independence late this week started to cause ripples in a wider pool of capital on Friday morning, as Spain — facing its own separatist movement in Catalonia — tightened against Germany. But the move reversed later in the day after Catalan president Artur Mas insisted an independence vote in the region would go ahead.

The UK government announced on Friday that it is planning to sell an offshore renminbi bond, which would make it the first sovereign outside China to do so. A slew of supranational and agency issuers have been drawn to the market this week following favourable moves in the dollar/renminbi basis swap.

This week's scorecard covers the funding progress of selected sovereign issuers. Read on to see which are over the 80% mark.

A long dated conventional bond was the overwhelming choice among Gilt investors for the UK Debt Management Office’s third quarter syndication, the DMO reported after holding consultations with market participants on Monday.

This week's scorecard covers the funding progress of sovereign issuers, with all of the eurozone periphery comfortably ahead in their programmes despite some wobbles in secondaries over the past month.