Search results for

Romania continued its return to the loan market this week with a unusual credit for corporate Thermo Electric. The new facility is a one year $100m receivables backed pre-import financing. Thermo Electric, the 100% state owned electricity company, has mandated Standard Bank, ABN Amro and Deutsche to arrange the facility. The leads plan to bring in two or three other banks at this level before the deal goes to general syndication.

DLJ's Hal Ritch has moved to Salomon Smith Barney as global co-head of M&A. He joins Greg Polle in New York and Tom King in London. Ritch joined DLJ in 1991 and in 1994 became global co-head of M&A, then head. After DLJ's takeover by CSFB, Ritch became a co-head of M&A at CSFB with Don Meltzer, who remains there. Steve Koch and Scot Lindsay are CSFB's co-chairs of M&A. The European branch of the investment bank, Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, is to establish an M&A business development group headed by Adrian Liddell and David Cantor.

Securitas AB, the world leader in the security services business, has awarded a mandate to BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank to lead manage its inaugural Eu500m-Eu750m offering. Roadshows began in London today (Thursday) and will go to Europe next week, finishing on Wednesday. The deal is expected to launch and price at the beginning of the following week. A five or seven year maturity is expected. Unofficial spread guidance on five years is mid-swaps plus 85bp and mid-swaps plus 100bp on seven years.

* Commerzbank AG Rating: Aa3/AA-/A+

Cazenove and Schroder Salomon Smith Barney began a £525m deeply discounted rights offering for Spirent this week to help pay for its £1.1bn purchase of US company Hekimian Laboratories. The telecoms test equipment company Spirent joined the FTSE 100 in September and will place the 140.7m shares at a ratio of five for 24 at a price of just 375p, a discount of 37% to Wednesday's closing price of 597p.

* Allstate Life Funding LLC Rating: AA+

Vodafone Group PLC, rated A2/A/A, the world's largest mobile phone company with 65.5m customers worldwide, reported strong interim results for the six months to September 30 on Tuesday. The results showed significant growth in operating profit, Ebitda, and operating metrics such as customer growth by region. The results were better than expected and provided comfort for bond and equity investors.

* Unique Zurich Airport gained 1.5% after the company sold 1.2m existing shares yesterday (Thursday), although trading during the day reflected the volatile market conditions. Credit Suisse First Boston led the secondary deal with a syndicate of five banks which helped to bring liquidity to the stock.

* Bank Austria AG Deficiency guarantee from: City of Vienna

The senior phase of syndication on the $1.015bn project financing for the Taweelah A1 independent water and power project has found an overwhelming response from the market. At this level, the deal has attracted over $2bn in commitments from around 20 banks and the syndication is now closed.

US utility Keyspan Corp and real estate investment trust Equity Office Properties (EOP) raised a total of $2.65bn this week, as US investors looked to high yielding investment grade alternatives to weak telecom and bank sectors. Some telecom bonds widened as much as 12bp this week as rumors circulated that British Telecom still plans to issue $10bn-$15bn of bonds this year.

Bookbuilding for Telenor's Nkr21bn-Nkr29bn (Eu2.6bn-Eu3.6bn) IPO, described by one member of the syndicate as "the transaction from hell", began on Monday in a market saturated with telecoms paper. This is the second time the company has planned its listing on Nasdaq and in Oslo. The first attempt was aborted in August before bookbuilding began. Telenor is offering shares at Nkr50-Nkr68. The deal consists of 372m capital increase shares and a greenshoe of 15%, which is made up of secondary shares sold by the Kingdom of Norway. The base deal represents 21% of the company's share capital.