UK

HICL Infrastructure, the UK-based infrastructure equity investor, completed a £120m ($153m) capital raise on Tuesday to repay £75m of debt and to fund an acquisition in Ireland.

Investors have got a fever, and the only cure is more pharma. Biotech equity issuance is surging, in line with rising stock prices in the secondary market, as stock pickers pan for the company that will cure Covid-19, among other maladies. But this is more speculating than investing and many are going to catch a cold chasing around a risky sector that is starting to look a lot like the dot-com bubble.

Richard Livingstone, the British billionaire property developer, sold Skr5.5bn ($616m) of shares in Swedish online gambling company Evolution Gaming in an overnight trade on Monday, to help mitigate the effect of Covid-19 on his property portfolio.

The UK Debt Management Office intends to sell a new 15 year Gilt via syndication in early September for which it will seek feedback through a consultation with Gilt market participants next week.

Segro, the FTSE 100 UK real estate investment trust, has sold €450m of private placements, according to market sources. The largest tranche was the longest, €200m at 20 years, which is sign of investors' confidence.

UK pub owner Stonegate held calls with investors on Monday for a bond issue, to partly refinance £2.73bn worth of acquisition facilities used to acquire a larger competitor, Ei. Stonegate is set to be one of the first UK borrowers hit by coronavirus to sell high yield notes.

Freeline Theraputics, the UK gene therapeutics company, has filed to list in the US on the Nasdaq exchange, continuing the trend of biotech companies seeking to raise capital in the equity capital markets.

Each week, Keeping Tabs brings you the very best of what we have found most useful, interesting and informative from around the web. This week: what’s next for the US after its war on Huawei, the impact that more robots would have on the gender pay gap, and a look on the bright side of Europe’s mishmash of state guarantee schemes.

This week's funding scorecard looks at the progress European sovereigns have made in their funding programmes in mid-July.

HICL Infrastructure, the UK-based infrastructure equity investor, has launched a capital raise to repay £75m worth of debt in order to shore up its finances for further acquisitions.

In this round-up, the UK bars Huawei Technologies from its 5G mobile network, the Chinese foreign ministry retaliates against recent US sanctions, and Donald Trump signs an executive order that ends Hong Kong’s preferential trade treatment.

Financial institutions are set to spend the summer months monitoring conditions for issuance in order to continue funding this year or to frontload funding needs for next year, according to deal arrangers.