UK

The UK government’s decision over the weekend to reintroduce a quarantine on travellers from Spain is set to make a rights issue far more difficult for International Consolidated Airlines Group (IAG), the airline holding company which owns British Airways, according to equity capital markets sources.

Vodafone has planted its flag to lead the 2021 IPO calendar, with the listing of its European towers unit in Frankfurt.

EMEA’s equity capital markets were buzzing on Friday morning after Goldman Sachs placed a 13.2m block of shares in Cellnex, the Spanish telecoms tower company, which allowed the company’s largest shareholder to monetise rights that it intends not to exercise in the issuer's forthcoming €4bn rights issue.

In this round-up, the already fraught relationship between the US and China faces fresh tests, as both countries continue announcing retaliatory measures against each other.

Coventry Building Society (CBS) is racing to price Economic Master Issuer 2020–1, with the help of arrangers HSBC and Lloyds, to meet the huge demand for the deal, which is a hybrid between a master trust structure and a standalone RMBS — the first of its kind. The transaction, set to herald the next step in master issuer structures, is an innovation which could open the door to more financial institutions committing to long-term RMBS programmes, writes Tom Brown.

Agreement in the EU this week on a €750bn recovery fund should remind market participants of the UK’s newfound vulnerability.

Countryside Properties, the UK house builder and urban regeneration company, completed a equity raise on Wednesday evening to repay debt in order to help it grow its business.

Royal Vopak, the Dutch oil and gas storage company, has sold $500m-equivalent in US private placements.

Credit analysts hope that European banks will be able to report much stronger capital levels in the second quarter, amid early signs that risk-weighted asset (RWA) volumes could be lower than expected.

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.