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|
| Russian Railways | |
| Value | £350 million 20-year bond, £300 million tap |
| Bookrunners | Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, VTB Capital |
| return to the Emerging Europe Deals of the Year index | |
Other notable CEE bond deals were few and far between last year, even before global conditions and an ill-timed $1 billion international debut from Serbia slammed markets shut in mid-September. Russian iron-ore producer Metalloinvest deserves a mention for a solid inaugural $750 million five-year transaction that attracted four times oversubscription against a difficult market backdrop in July, but the final place in the 2011 winners list goes to Russian Railways for reopening the sterling market to CEE investors with an unprecedented 20-year deal.
The quasi-sovereign borrower had already made a name for itself in the global bond markets with a heavily oversubscribed $1.5 billion debut in March 2010 but the choice of both currency and maturity was nevertheless a bold one, given the notoriously conservative nature of UK institutional investors and the fact that the only previous Russian forays into the market – by Gazprom and VTB – had been for much shorter-dated paper.
