UK

A former head of UK equity capital markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch has been appointed chief executive of UK Financial Investments, which manages the government’s stakes in Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland.

US biotech firm MaxCyte started trading on London’s junior stock exchange on Tuesday, after raising £10m from its initial public offering.

ICAP, the interdealer broker, has launched a daily index that measures the effective cost of funding for sterling government bonds.

The Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), a financial services provider for non-profits, has closed the offer period for its retail charity bond a week earlier than expected.

Index provider FTSE Russell announced on Wednesday a new index which combines for the first time the China A-shares and Hong Kong-listed H-shares of the 50 largest Chinese companies.

The Bank of England has raised its countercyclical buffer in response to the UK’s looming European Union referendum, as it tries to ensure banks will continue to lend in the event of a ‘Brexit’ vote.

Cairn Homes, the Irish housebuilder that floated in London for €440m last June, completed its second post-IPO capital raising this week, raising €175m to buy further land for development.

After a barren year of sterling bond issuance from international borrowers, a dry patch that some thought would last until the Brexit referendum in June, an Australian company finally broke the silence on Wednesday.

Heightened talk around Brexit is adding to the pressure on UK credit spreads and, combined with European Central Bank promises of an investment grade corporate bond purchase programme, causing British names to underperform their eurozone peers. But market participants say this presents a buying opportunity as a reversal could follow.

Standard & Poor’s astonished the equity-linked bond market on Wednesday evening by stripping the equity credit from Vodafone’s £2.9bn mandatory convertibles, issued in February, only a month after assigning the credit. The change knocks away one advantage of the deal for Vodafone and may damage banks’ hopes of replicating it.

The London Stock Exchange’s order book for retail bonds received a welcome boost this week as it won its second issuer of 2016.

The same benign financing conditions that propelled global M&A volume to a post-crisis record in 2015 are in place for UK blue chip companies this year. But treasurers are adopting a cautious approach ahead of the EU vote, writes Ross Lancaster