UK

Moody’s trimmed its ratings for Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland this week, citing concern about the impact that ring-fencing regulation could have on the banks’ creditors.

Commodity trader Glencore received a glorious response from the loan market to its latest refinancing, with the size of its annual revolver leaping by almost $4bn during syndication to close at $9.7bn. But senior bankers warned that this is a sign of lender desperation, not borrower strength, writes Michael Turner.

Nationwide Building Society issued its first sterling covered bond for two years on Thursday and showed that demand for the product was still strong as it picked up £1bn of five year funding.

Moody’s has slapped a downgrade review on UK engineering group GKN’s Ba3 rating following the successful hostile takeover bid from industrial conglomerate Melrose.

A pair of gatecrashers have burst into Temenos’ £1.4bn bid for UK trading technology firm Fidessa, with one party offering a 5% premium to the existing deal from the Swiss banking software company.

Commodity trader Glencore has ramped up the size of its short term revolver by almost $4bn between syndication launch and signing, with dozens of banks piling into the refinancing exercise in the latest example of deal starved lenders scrabbling for places to put money to work.

Mireille Dyrberg, the former COO of Nex Group fintech subsidiary TriOptima, has joined data reconciliation firm Duco.

ECM director Nishit Ruparelia is understood to have left Citi before the Easter break, having been at the bank for over 13 years.

Industrial conglomerate Melrose has prevailed in its £8bn hostile bid for UK engineering firm GKN, after weeks of sabre-rattling rhetoric on both sides. Looking at GKN’s shaky defence, it is hard to see how there could have been any other outcome.

Tenaga Wind Ventures UK has signed a £120m loan facility arranged by BayernLB, as the UK renewable energy arm of Malaysian utility Tenaga Nasional looks to refinance the debt-powered acquisition of two companies.

Walt Disney has thrown Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox a lifeline in its battle to acquire the remaining shares of Sky it does not own by offering to buy Sky News, putting pressure on the £22.1bn debt-backed offer for the whole of Sky from rival bidder Comcast.

Industrial conglomerate Melrose has received enough votes to acquire engineering group GKN, after weeks of increasingly strongly worded attacks from both boards and the intervention of the UK government.