State-owned Bulgarian Energy Holding (BEH) has successfully placed a EUR 550 M issue of Eurobonds on international capital markets, Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova has announced.

The bonds carry an annual coupon of 4.875%, Petkova wrote on Facebook on Tuesday. 

The energy holding will use the proceeds from the bond issue to repay a bridge loan which BEH took out earlier this year to repay debt of its subsidiary National Electricity Company (NEK) owed to the local power plants of U.S.-based AES Corporation and ContourGlobal.

The EUR 550 M five-year unsecured bond issue was almost four times oversubscribed, as investors placed bids for some EUR 2.1 B worth of BEH bonds, according to capital.bg  

“The achieved yield is 5.125%, which experts see as a good result against the background of problems in the energy sector and volatile capital markets after Brexit and the coup attempt in Turkey,” the Bulgarian business newspaper said in its online edition.

An announcement that an unnamed investor had booked 20% of the issue, which was made at the start of the subscription, gave a  positive signal to other investors, the newspaper said. It added that according to two independent sources that investor had been the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

The bonds from the second issue will be listed on the Irish stock Exchange, on which bonds from BEH’s first issue already trade. The EUR 500 M, five-year issue was placed at an yield of 4.287% in 2013.