UK Sovereign

Mother and child retail firm Mothercare is set to raise £100m through a fully underwritten rights issue that will fund its move towards digital.

Virgin Media, the UK cable television, broadband and mobile phone company, plans to issue its first senior unsecured bond for two years, with a dual currency deal of £600m.

British housebuilder Miller Homes launched an IPO on Monday that could value it at around £450m, the latest in a run of plays on British property growth.

Following the restructuring of the business at the beginning of September, RBS has announced the management team for EMEA investment grade debt capital markets.

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.