Priced in London and New York last night Thursday, a $2.29 billion global bond for Singapore Telecommunications has set a new Asian benchmark and stands second to the Republic of Korea's $4 billion deal as the largest on record from the region. Both deals were lead managed by Goldman Sachs and Salomon Smith Barney and bankers from each have been quick to draw parallels between the two.
Both transactions drew the kind of unstoppable momentum that the leads will now be hoping does not feed through too strongly into secondary market trading and tighten SingTel's spreads down to the kind of levels that its AA-A1 credit rating would imply minus...
