DCM: Turkey bonds sink in secondary market

Liability management can be a double-edged sword. Get it right and everyone showers you with plaudits about your relative sophistication as a borrower and how attentive you are to addressing investors’ wants and needs. Get it wrong, however, and your name is quickly mud and the world and his fund manager wife are soon griping about how naive you are and how difficult it will be for you to achieve your funding target for the year if you carry on in a such a cavalier, market-unfriendly manner.

The Republic of Turkey, with $6 billion or so to raise in the international bond markets in 2007 – by far the largest amount of any sovereign in the emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa region – could clearly have done with a good start to its funding programme.

In recent years, the borrower has done exactly that. In January 2006, for example, it launched a well-received $1.5 billion 2036 bond via Citigroup and Deutsche Bank – its longest-ever dollar bond at the time – attracting $6 billion of orders.

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