UniCredit

The European Central Bank has lowered UniCredit’s Pillar 2 capital requirements by 50bp, recognising the Italian lender’s latest efforts to clean up its balance sheet.

Austrian oil and gas company OMV discovered on Thursday that investors are far from finished with the investment grade corporate bond market in 2017. The strength of demand for its new nine year deal resulted in the company printing its largest ever bond.

Deutsche Post DHL Group secured excellent terms on Wednesday when it issued a €1bn convertible bond at a negative yield, despite investors having been distracted by a collapse in the share and bond prices of equity-linked regular Steinhoff International on the same day.

Investor support for leveraged loan deals where the issuer is only seeking to cut margins remains so strong that some borrowers, such as French real estate group Foncia, may do it twice this year.

Italian gambling company Gamenet Group priced a €72m Milan IPO this week after bookrunners slashed the price and reduced the size at the end of last week.

Amprion, the German electricity transmission firm, has raised €200m with an issue of Schuldscheine and Namensschuldverschreibungen (NSV) — a similar instrument that is registered and can have a maturity longer than 10 years.

Irish headquartered US energy technology company Johnson Controls sold the shortest corporate bond deal of the week on Tuesday, tapping into the pool of investor money looking for a safe option into the end of the year.

The three corporate bond issuers who sold new issues in euros on Tuesday offered something short, something intermediate and something long. The shorter tranches benefitted from the most interest.

Ford Motor Credit Co, the financial services arm of US motor company Ford announced a dual tranche corporate bond deal on Monday comprising two floating rate notes.

French toll road operator Holding d’Infrastructures de Transport paid a hefty premium last Friday as it sold a dual tranche bond to help refinance its March 2018 note. The Baa3 rated subsidiary of Spanish infrastructure company Abertis suffered from the uncertainty surrounding a takeover of its parent company.

Two leveraged loan deals in the market this week, for Tele Columbus and PlusServer, have both had their margins tightened by 25bp, suggesting that market participants who predicted early this week that spreads were going to start widening had spoken too soon.

The dollar tranche of Ülker’s second loan of the year has been priced 20bp tighter than on its first loan of 2017, suggesting the market is swinging in Turkish borrowers’ favour as political noise in the country quietens down.