nation Gulf Cooperation Council will have to offer investors higher-yields as they seek to refinance about $70 billion of debt maturing this year, Standard Chartered said. “With significant debt maturities coming into the year and concerns over transparency for some GCC economies, risk premiums will build up and this will serve to push up borrowing costs,” Nafees Akbarali, regional head of fixed income, currencies and commodities trading at the London-based bank said Tuesday. Borrowers from the GCC, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, sold $32.6 billion of bonds last year, compared with $42.8 billion in 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Standard Chartered, the second largest underwriter of Gulf bonds last year, arranged $4.1 billion of the notes, or 12.5 percent of the total, the data show. “With large refinancing needs, regional bond markets will be active as entities look to tap into global investor appetite, given their ability to offer more attractive yields,” Akbarali said. The average yield on the HSBC/NASDAQ Dubai GCC Conventional US Dollar Bond Index, made up of notes from Qatar to Saudi Arabia, have risen 47 basis points to 5.1 percent after reaching a low of 4.64 percent on Oct. 13, 2010. The yield on Dubai's 6.396 percent Islamic bond maturing in November 2014 gained 25 basis points to 6.3 percent in the same period.
