Cloud 9fin

German wire and cables manufacturer Leoni is in the process of implementing its restructuring plan, approved by the Nurembourg court under the new German bankruptcy regime StaRUG. It is the first big test of the new framework, which proved useful for cramming down dissenting minority shareholders and getting an agreement in place with several stakeholders in time to save the group from insolvency....

Sometimes it feels like the next wave of distress in the debt markets is always two quarters away. What if it’s already here — less of a tsunami and more of a gradual rise in the sea level? Chris Wright runs the private markets group at Crescent Capital , and has plenty of experience as a junior capital provider to stressed credits. As we reported this week , tapping third parties for instruments...

Recent developments in the German Real Estate industry have attracted significant attention due to controversial governance and questionable transactions, which were further exacerbated by a series of short-seller attacks. However, are these factors solely responsible for their bonds trading at distressed levels and the equity at a considerable discount to book value? For this week’s podcast, Chri...

Credit ratings are one of the foundations of modern credit markets — and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners wants in on the action. Several months ago, the regulatory association announced plans to adjust the capital charges for insurance companies investing in CLO debt and equity, by developing an in-house rating methodology instead of relying on the big three agencies. The plans...

Will Thames Water’s overflowing £14bn debt pile lead to its downfall? Or should everyone pipe down? Bianca Boorer sits down with Owen Sanderson to discuss the media storm around Thames Water over the last two weeks, dispelling misguided views on its liquidity while going through potential obstacles down the stream.

The infamous J.Crew maneuver was a bombshell, setting a blueprint for contentious liability management deals and sparking a wave of efforts to block such maneuvers. Now, some direct lenders are worried they've found a way around those blockers. As we wrote earlier this week, securitization baskets in some credit agreements could be loose enough to allow borrowers to securitize assets like intellec...

Thanks to rising scrutiny from investors, ESG is no longer just a second thought in private credit dealmaking. It’s now a must-have. Private funds are using a variety of methods to integrate ESG considerations into their decision-making: for this week’s episode, our host Sammy Cole sat down with Cassandra Fahy, a managing director at Pemberton Asset Management, to discuss some of them. How has the...

The end of Libor is a little over a week away, and some US corporate borrowers are still racing to switch their floating rate loans to SOFR ahead of the 30 June deadline. The loan market’s transition away from the old reference rate has been slow, but increasingly contentious in recent months. Borrowers, lenders and financial sponsors have tussled over the compensation offered to loan investors to...

Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget (SBB) has had a tough couple of months, after losing its investment grade rating and with some bondholders now arguing the company has breached a key covenant under its bond documentation. For this week’s episode of Cloud9fin, Bianca Boorer sits down with Hazik Siddiqui and David Orbay-Graves to look into the Swedish real estate firm’s recent accounting revisions, ways it c...

Private credit is attracting plenty of new faces these days, but as we wrote in this week’s Unicrunch newsletter, a handful of household names dominate fundraising and dealmaking. Craig Packer is one of those names. Owl Rock, the direct lending firm he co-founded back in 2016, was already a power player in direct lending before it merged with Dyal Capital in 2021 to create Blue Owl; he’s now at th...

Why is Pizza Express getting into the music business? Well, these plans have been in the works for a while, and they actually make more sense than you might think. That doesn’t mean this venture is without risk — especially as the company’s margins are deteriorating, and it’s had some troublesome relations with hourly workers over the past few months. So how does PX Records, the group’s new jazz-f...

9fin’s distressed reporter Bianca Boorer travels to Milan to sit down with Bruno Cova, Partner and European co-chair of restructuring and insolvency at law firm Greenberg Traurig. Cova takes us through his illustrious career so far, from working for the Italian government, on Parmalat, Europe’s largest fraud case, to moving into private practice and working on big restructuring cases such Moby and...

Ever pulled an all-nighter to prepare a pitch, or had your weekend ruined by a last-minute fire drill from your MD? Imagine if artificial intelligence could crunch the numbers and format the slidedeck for you. What would you do with the extra free time? But also, what valuable, formative experiences might you miss out on if you could outsource rote tasks to technology? And how might that change th...

Announcing a refinancing on the day your debt matures is an unusual move — and indeed, Lycra ’s refinancing stretched some boundaries. But it’s also a great example of how not all drop-down transactions are the same. For this week’s episode of Cloud 9fin , Bianca Boorer sat down with Brian Dearing to discuss Lycra’s last minute refi of its 2023 notes. The company’s innovative variation on the infa...

When is a change in control not a change of control? That is the question some Focus Financial lenders are asking after the company managed to finance its $7bn buyout without refinancing its existing debt. It all hinges on the wording of the credit agreement — so for this week’s episode of Cloud 9fin , Will Caiger-Smith sat down with 9fin’s debt covenant expert James Wallick to talk about this str...

The 9fin team explores the influence of Benteler’s debut bond deal with Josh Latham. Josie Shillito guides us through the growing trend of private take-privates and Jennifer Munnings discusses the recent clarifications from the European Commission on the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR).

These days, private credit is becoming so popular that you could be forgiven for thinking it was a recent invention. But some people were doing private credit before it was cool. Tim Lyne is one of those people — when he and a group of colleagues founded Antares Capital back in the nineties, the idea of a jumbo unitranche must have seemed like a pipe dream. For this week’s episode of the Cloud 9fi...

9fin sits down with Ben Thompson, JP Morgan's Head of EMEA Leveraged Finance Debt Capital Markets on 24 April 2023. He gives us his insights into how the traditional debt capital markets soldiers on despite the recent banking crisis and what he sees coming in the pipeline in 2023. 

The 9fin team takes a look into Adler’s restructuring in the UK High Court with Chris Haffenden. Brian Dearing takes us through a report on 2022 covenant trends and Jennifer Munnings and Dan Power discuss insights into our ESG data and what they indicate for LevFin.

It’s kind of debt, and kind of equity. It’s been around for decades, but has recently come back into fashion. What is it? It’s convertible debt. Convertible bonds are a clubby and often overlooked corner of the corporate finance world. Last year, plunging equity valuations made for some notable horror stories — like Peloton , Ocado and Affirm — but in recent months the market has become popular on...

Primary markets are not as simple as they used to be. How can borrowers navigate the choppy waters of today’s credit markets to manage their liabilities? In this week’s episode of the Cloud 9fin podcast, Brian Dearing chats to Andy Hagan, Tom Richards and Gilles Teerlinck of Weil, Gotshal & Manges to get the lowdown on how companies are dealing with a challenging market backdrop. They discuss...

Unlike liquid leveraged loans, private debt is not frequently traded (although there are signs that this might be changing) and thus can be hard to value. But the funds that hold those private loans still have to find a way to value their books. How do they make their marks? In this episode of our Cloud 9fin podcast, deputy editor Bill Weisbrod sits down with Brian Garfield, a managing director in...

9fin sits down with Boris Okuliar, portfolio manager and co-head of Global Liquid Credit in the Ares Credit Group. He gives us his opinions on the state of the market and discusses where he see value.

As Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Who knew he was predicting the policy response to the first big bank failures since the 2008 financial crisis? Some of us at 9fin are old enough to remember the alphabet soup of rules and specially designed capital instruments that was cooked up in the wake of the GFC, to ensure that banks could melt down in an order...

Katharine Hidalgo sits down with two debt advisers from Alvarez & Marsal to discuss what they foresee for the market. Tim Metzgen, Managing Director and EMEA Head of Debt Advisory and Senior Director Tom Paterson give us some insight into how borrowers are managing a more challenging environment and what lenders are asking for in 2023.