Greek Bond Sale Said to Top $4 Billion in Market Return

By Marcus Bensasson and Hannah Benjamin  Apr 10, 2014 12:20 PM GMT+0300

Bloomberg

Greece is ending a four-year exile from international markets with a bond sale of at least 3 billion euros ($4.2 billion), more than the government estimated, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The order book for the issue, which carries a coupon of 4.75 percent, exceeded 20 billion euros, said the person, who asked not to be identified because he isn’t authorized to speak about it. A Greek government official told reporters in Athens yesterday that Greece sought to raise 2.5 billion euros in the five-year bond issue.

“Today we return to the bond markets after four years,” Greek Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said at a conference in Athens today. “The real economy is showing encouraging signs of recovery.”

Greece, which has been bailed out twice, carried out the world’s biggest sovereign-debt restructuring and teetered on the brink of exiting the euro, had been shut out of bond markets since March 2010 and kept afloat with aid totaling 240 billion euros from the euro area and the International Monetary Fund.

Those funds necessitated the regular presence in Athens of officials from the so-called troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF, which became associated with austerity measures that triggered a political and social backlash.

“We welcome this,” Poul Thomsen, the IMF’s mission chief to Greece, said yesterday. “It’s a fundamental objective of the program to bring Greece back to market and this is an important milestone in this regard, and that clearly speaks to the success of the program.”

Car Bomb

A car bomb exploded outside one of the Bank of Greece’s offices in central Athens this morning as a reminder of the upheaval that continues to rock the country almost four years after it resorted to calling for outside aid. Police said no one was injured in the bombing.

Protests, strikes and even bombings have been regular occurrences in Greece since then. Today’s device exploded at about 6 a.m. outside a building belonging to the Bank of Greece, causing some damage to surrounding buildings, a police spokeswoman said by phone.

“The apparent aim of the perpetrators is to change the agenda,” Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said on Skai TV, adding that the identity of the perpetrators is not known. “We will not allow terrorists to achieve their goal.”

Aid Payment

Greece won approval this month from euro-area members for an 8.3 billion-euro aid payment, the first disbursement from its bailout program since December. The government and European Union predict that Greece will this year emerge from six years of recession that has cost about a quarter of the country’s economic output and sent the unemployment rate surging.

Greece’s unemployment rate dropped to 26.7% in January from 27.2% in the previous month, according to data today from the Athens-based Hellenic Statistical Authority. Consumer prices declined 1.5 percent in March from a year earlier, compared with a 0.9 percent decline in February, a separate report showed.

To contact the reporters on this story: Marcus Bensasson in Athens at mbensasson@bloomberg.net; Hannah Benjamin in London at hbenjamin1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Stirling at cstirling1@bloomberg.net; Jerrold Colten at jcolten@bloomberg.net Jones Hayden