UK

Boohoo, the UK online fashion retailer, priced a £197.68m equity capital raise on Thursday night, to raise funds to take advantage of M&A opportunities in the global fashion industry brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.

Allianz was calling for investment in a €1bn tier two capital issue on Friday, a couple of days after disclosing a tough set of results for the first quarter. The weaker performance largely stemmed from Covid-19, which weighed heavily on the German insurer’s Solvency II capital ratio.

As UK mid-cap companies face the worst disruption that most of them will have experienced, many are turning to their corporate brokers for advice on how to survive the coronavirus crisis. Carlton Nelson, co-head of Investec's corporate broking business, has worked on a number of Covid-19 capital raising deals for UK companies and shared his experiences of an unprecedented crisis — its effects on the business that needs to be done and how it is executed.

The UK Debt Management Office launched its first bond syndication of the new financial year on Tuesday, smashing all previous records for deal and order book size and making a healthy start on its largest ever borrowing programme in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Despite the huge size, the deal caused “barely a ripple”, thanks to the support of the Bank of England’s asset purchase facility.

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The European Central Bank said this week that it wants to be ‘pragmatic’ with its supervisory review and evaluation process (SREP) this year, keeping Pillar 2 capital requirements at stable levels for banks amid the coronavirus crisis.

Network Homes is looking for US private placements, according to several market sources. The London housing association is the first of its type to return to the market after a string of prospective PPs were suspended during the initial peak of the pandemic crisis. Sources expect these postponed deals to return shortly.

GIC, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, sold 115m shares in medical product and technologies company ConvaTec on Monday night following a huge rally in the stock price.

The wave of accelerated capital raisings in the UK in response to the Covid-19 crisis has caused consternation in some circles because retail investors cannot access to these deals. While the principle of shareholder equality is without doubt a noble one, in reality larger shareholders have always had more access to equity capital markets deals than retail investors have.

The UK Debt Management Office launched its first syndication of the new financial year on Tuesday, smashing all previous records for deal and order book size and making a healthy start on the sovereign’s largest ever borrowing programme in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Diversified Gas and Oil, the London-listed US oil and gas firm, has raised £69.4m of equity to help fund a package of potential acquisitions, taking advantage of continued low global oil and gas prices.

Equity bankers expect to be busy with more capital raising in the next few weeks as UK corporates prepare for a prolonged period of business interruption after the government laid out plans for a slower reopening of the economy than many had hoped for.