Turkish Builder Calls Investor Meeting to Extend Bond Maturity

Taylan Bilgic, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- Turkish builder Nurol is asking investors to extend the maturity of its floating-rate bonds issued two years ago — with a senior executive denying the move was related to rising interest rates in the country.

Nurol Insaat ve Ticaret AS called investors in the 1.4 billion-lira ($51 million) bonds that mature next year to hold a restructuring meeting on Oct. 20. The bonds were sold to domestic qualified investors with a pledge to link the yield to the Turkish lira overnight reference rate, or TLRef, that debuted in 2019.

“We didn’t want to classify these bonds as short-term in our full-year financials,” Nurol Holding CFO Kerim Kemahli said by phone. “We could have redeemed them and issue new bonds, but with the current regulations that would have been more costly.” The company seeks to extend the maturity to the end of 2026, he said.

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Following President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s election victory in May, the nation’s central bank embraced a more orthodox monetary policy and intensified its fight against inflation that hovers near 60%. Governor Hafize Gaye Erkan has raised the benchmark rate by 21.5 percentage points since May, a move welcomed by global investors but which has boosted the cost of funding for local corporates. The TLRef stood at 31.5% on Monday, having increased by more than 21 percentage points in the past four months.

Kemahli argued that Nurol’s plans didn’t strictly qualify as restructuring: “A company would not restructure debt with more than 12 months to maturity,” he said.