On 2 April, the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB) issued a €1 billion, 7-year maturity COVID-19 Response Social Inclusion Bond in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This funding will be used to help the 41 CEB member countries mitigate the social and economic impact of the health crisis.
Following the announcement of the transaction, the order book reached more than €3.9 billion in just over an hour. The deal also gathered the largest order book of any CEB benchmark to date, with final books standing in excess of €4.5 billion. This allowed the CEB to set the deal’s size at €1 billion, making it the largest ever social inclusion bond issued by the Bank, which had already issued three since 2017.
The proceeds raised will finance social projects which support small and medium-sized enterprises particularly affected by the impact of the pandemic and should also be extended to the health sector. See the press release: https://bit.ly/3aVkFPb (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)