Project finance has fallen under the spotlight of competition authorities as traditional antitrust concerns over competitors’ joining forces have met with increasing worries about financial customers suffering from information asymmetries.
Against this background, pricing, and more precisely “market conditions”, has been the thread pulled by the Spanish trustbuster to unravel, felicitously or not, the long entangled knot of syndicated loans and financial derivatives in its recent Financial Derivatives decision.
In this article, the three limbs of the decision will be discussed: loan syndication as a cooperation agreement among competitors, price coordination, and loan and hedge tie-in.
Syndicated loans and financial derivatives: ‛Belling the cat’ of market conditions