Capital markets faces carbon reckoning as vultures circle Russian companies

Send us Fan MailBanks might finally be held to account for the damage to the environment their bond and equity underwriting does. Elsewhere, three Russian companies might face bankruptcy thanks to the effect of sanctions on their convertible bonds.While it has been fairly straightforward to measure what emissions a loan or an investment funds, assessing the part a bank’s capital markets deal arranging business plays in polluting the planet — working on an oil company IPO, or lead managing a bond for a mining company, say — has been harder to acknowledge. Now, work is underway to shed light on this vital part of greening the financial system just as HSBC — a big bank in this business — committed to disclose the impact of its capital markets business for oil, gas, power and utilities clients, following shareholder pressure.But what will these disclosures tell us? How long will they take to arrive? And most importantly, how will they get banks to reduce their impact via the capital markets?Meanwhile, three Russian companies are facing an existential threat thanks to the convertible bonds they issued running up against sanctions. We have discussed Russian defaults on the podcast before but these companies, thanks to a combination of Western sanctions, and those of their own government, face bankruptcy if they cannot find the money to buy back the bonds they sold to investors. So far, the bondholders — who likely don’t want to or can’t own a Russian business in a different sector to their own — are working with lawyers and the companies themselves to work out how to resolve a complicated situation.We discuss how they ended up in this mess and what the remedies may be in what is, in the parlance of our times, an unprecedented time for this part of the capital markets.