Latin American originators continue to push product in the cross-border market, despite the menace of rising rates. Brazil's Banco Bradesco issued an eight-year US$100 million transaction backed by diversified payment rights (DPRs). Wrapped by MBIA, the deal priced at 4.685%. "Using the monoline makes the deal less expensive for us," said Jose Guilherme Lembi, executive director at Bradesco. "If we swap the deal into a floating spread, it comes out to less than 40 basis points over Libor."
Funds, Lembi added, are going to trade finance. ABN AMRO led the deal, reprising its role from a two-tranche US$400 million arranged for Bradesco in October 2003. Dewey Ballantine and Pinheiro Neto were principal legal counsel for the originator in the current deal on the cross-border and domestic fronts, respectively. Clifford Chance provided counsel as well. Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw advised ABN on the cross-border side.
Barclays: Still in LatAm ABS?
Elsewhere in DPR territory, the buzz is that Nomura Securities and Barclays Capital have a joint mandate for Brazil's Unibanco. The question on the minds of many ABS players is what role Barclays will play, given that it no longer has a team of dedicated Latin American structured finance bankers. Apparently, U.S. bankers on the Barclays side are handling the mandate and they are said to be focusing on distribution. The structuring has reportedly fallen mostly in the hands of Nomura, which led a 25bn DPR securitization for Unibanco late in 2003.
The ex-Deutsche bankers that recently hopped over to Nomura's private placement desk - Conrad Owen, Geoffrey Schmidt and Lou Sampanas - will be involved in marketing the deal as well, according to a source. Barclays last Latin American structured deal was in March 2002, when it closed a DPR securitization
for El Salvador's Banco Agricola. Officials from Nomura and Barclays either declined to comment or did not return calls.
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