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Weekly Lists
April 20, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 29
bne:Credit
Turkey’s Yildiz Holding reportedly close to completing $6.5bn debt restructuring
World Bank’s IFC to lend tenge-equivalent of $82mn to support Kazakh microfinance
Yildiz Holding, owner of the brands Godiva chocolate and McVitie’s biscuits, is likely to complete the restructuring of $6.5bn of its total $8.5bn debts by the end of next week, two unnamed people close to the matter told Reuters on April 18.
Investor anxieties over Turkish corporate debt are rising with the recent rapid depreciation of the Turkish lira (TRY) having driven up the cost of servicing foreign currency debt for companies in Turkey.
The restructuring loan will have a maturity of four plus four years with a stress test to be held at the end of the first four years. Yildiz Holding will offer almost all of its domestic real estate along
with some overseas assets as collateral, according to the news agency’s sources.
The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) will pro- vide a senior syndicated loan of $82mn in Kazakh tenge-equivalent to “KMF” to boost lending to micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Kazakhstan’s rural areas with a special focus on women entrepre- neurs, the IFC said in a statement on April 13.
Access to finance stands as a major challenge for MSEs in Central Asia. In some Central Asian countries, MSEs are the driving force behind the economy.
KMF’s client-base expanded from 150,000 to 220,000 borrowers within the last two years, with its credit portfolio increasing from KZT34bn to KZT90bn, Shalkar Zhussupov, chairman of KMF's man- agement board, said. The funding will help expand it further.
The stock of Hungarian government bonds held by non-profit insti- tutions rose HUF127bn (€410mn) in the first two months of 2018, rising to an all-time high of HUF350bn, up from HUF237bn at the end of 2017, local press reported on April 16.
With the Magyar Nemzeti Bank's foundations ruled out as buyers, local media speculate that religious institutions may be behind the deal, given the size of investments. The lack of publicly available data on their financing makes such speculation hard to verify.
Mysterious buyer appears on Hungarian retail bond market