UniCredit

UniCredit has hired Edouard Lemardeley, one of Crédit Agricole’s French corporate debt capital markets origination bankers.

Swedbank priced the tightest non-German euro seven year benchmark covered bond in over five years on Wednesday and paid virtually no new issue premium.

Bank Austria opened books on Thursday morning for its third covered bond deal of the year, a €500m seven year public sector Pfandbrief. Despite pricing flat to its curve the deal received one of the highest levels of oversubscription for any Austrian deal in the last two years.

French insurance firm Axa is looking to sell a rare perpetual non-call note, taking in a blowout book despite the heft of subordinated financials debt seen this week.

Five FIG issuers took to the subordinated markets to take advantage of months of undersupply this week, with the results highlighting not just the feverish grab for yield but also just how far banks have come since the crisis of 2008 in building their capital levels.

Deoleo, the Spanish olive oil producer, set terms for its €600m-equivalent refinancing loan at a lender meeting on Tuesday.

German construction group Hochtief has extended €2bn of loans by five years through its existing bank syndicate.

UniCredit took a strong step towards meeting its 2014 profit plans in the first quarter, according to results published on Monday. After taking huge losses through goodwill writedowns and loan loss provisions at the end of last year, the group’s profits rebounded, underpinned by decent results from Commercial Bank of Italy, UniCredit CIB and its central eastern Europe division.

Spanish olive oil producer Deoleo will hold bank meetings this week to raise a loan of around €600m to refinance debt.

Schaeffler returned to the bond market this week, for the first time since Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s upgraded the industrial bearings maker in September, after it managed to sell €950m of its stake in tyre producer Continental.

Türk Ekonomi Bankasi (TEB) is preparing to join its Turkish bank peers in the medium term note market. Bankers expect it to debut before the summer, but are perplexed by the borrower’s programme which will only let it print notes with maturities of up to a year.

German insurer Württembergische Lebensversicherung sold its second ever subordinated bond on Wednesday. Recent sub deals from insurers have attracted favourable responses from investors, a result of offering a more attractive yield than comparable bank paper.