News
Quintain announces agreement of new debt facilities | 07/04/2008
Quintain
is pleased to announce that it has reached agreement with eight relationship
banks to refinance its current banking debt facilities which will result in a
significant increase to average maturity.
Quintain
has refinanced all its banking debt with a series of bi-lateral loans. The new loan facilities total £620m and have an average tenure of 5.6
years, with an average margin of 1.15% for the mixture of five and six year
facilities.
Earlier
this year, Quintain announced that it had raised an additional £300 million of
debt since 30 September 2007 with an average maturity of 2 years as an interim
measure pending this refinancing. All of this debt has been repaid and
cancelled as part of this new exercise. Having completed this first tranche of
debt raising Quintain has commenced negotiations with new relationship banks to
create additional facilities under the same terms.
Rebecca
Worthington, Quintain’s Finance Director, said:
“We firmly believe that it is
prudent to have longer maturity debt at this time of economic volatility. These
new competitive facilities enable us to focus on activities that will generate
shareholder value with confidence in the strengthened surety and structure of
our capital base. As with our previous
facilities, these new facilities have the potential to be used across the
portfolio.
“We
are very pleased about the tremendous ongoing support for Quintain’s strategy shown
by our loyal group of relationship banks.”
At 31 December 2007 Quintain’s net debt was £485m,
with gearing standing at 45% compared with a gearing covenant of 110%.
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