Our Legal Insights Blog

We are thrilled to introduce an exciting new initiative to celebrate our Back to School promotion. Our founder, Sabrina Fox, recently introduced a powerful tool for comprehending the complex world of high yield bond covenants - the High Yield Bond Mind Map. This innovative resource promises to revolutionize the way you analyze high yield bonds.

Ceconomy has launched its refinancing of its senior unsecured notes due 2026, choosing a standard high yield structure as compared to their previous, more IG-like German law governed bonds. In our red flag review, we noted several key features.

In this week’s deal from the French franchisee, Bertrand Franchise, the Burger King refinance takes the famous motto on the road as covenant updates allow the borrower to “have it their way” when it comes to covenant calculations. The borrower is adding calculation flexibility compared to the Burger King France SSNs due 2026 being refinanced that brings the provisions up to market standard for top-tier sponsor deals by allowing any calculation for any covenant in respect of any transaction to be done – pretty much – anytime, and removes the requirement to make consent payments for amendments to all lenders.

Last week, I wrote about the magic of a blackline in the context of analysing docs for a repeat issuer or in a refinancing. Nothing else highlights key changes quite as well, as demonstrated by Lottomatica’s added bells and whistles in this week’s offering of senior secured fixed and floating rate notes. TLDR: Lottomatica is getting a flexibility upgrade, whilst lender protections are watered down.

Last night, I ran a blackline of Fedrigoni’s new seniorsecured notes (the May Notes) against January’s (the January Notes), and found twoimportant features – one of which can be used to make a relative value comparisonbetween the two series. 1. The May Notes contain two valuable redemptionfeatures for the borrower, with a third additional kicker folded in,that the January Notes do not have, making the January Notes moreeconomically protective for investors. 2. The May Notes and the January Notes back-datethe builder basket to the start date for the builder basket of thebonds that are being refinanced, but fail to disclose the built-up capacityunder that basket, making it a kind of “hidden” source of capacity.

April 25, 2024 – London, United Kingdom: Online legal education provider Fox Legal Training today announces the launch of a new educational webinar series on leveraged finance covenants that will use high yield deals in the primary market as a teaching tool for market participants.

In light of the recent news that a well-known telco borrower is using assets transferred to an Unrestricted Subsidiary as leverage for lenders to participate in discounted debt buybacks, we thought it was a good time to highlight potential sources of Unrestricted Subsidiary investments capacity in the average leveraged finance deal.

Last week I had the pleasure of witnessing the progress of one of my students in real time. Having joined the course only a few weeks ago, he sent over a completed covenant capacity grid for my review ahead of a catch-up call. What I saw absolutely thrilled me – the grid was almost flawless, highlighting nearly every significant basket across debt and liens, restricted payments and permitted investments. His work showed the tangible benefits of dedicated study and proved the thesis that underpinned my establishment of FLT.