Albanian debtors.

– would be a natural route for an issuer to regain market access and help normalize its funding profile. The format would give bondholders additional comfort, particularly after they were asked to swap their senior and subordinated debt into equity to help plug a combined 14.4-billion-euro capital hole across the four largest banks in 2015 as they crumbled under an exodus of deposits and a spike in bad loans. NBG confirmed to IFR yesterday that it was contemplating a covered bond issue, but that it had not yet mandated banks. The bank listed a “return to modest primary capital markets activity” among its strategic objectives in a corporate update earlier this year. It is on track to eliminate its ELA funding in the short term, having reduced its exposure to 2.6 billion euros from a high of 17.6 billion euros in the second quarter of 2015. “Execution of remaining capital actions and other initiatives, expected during the next few months, will

Albanian tax authorities have toughened measures against debtor businesses, blocking over 75,000 bank accounts of companies that have failed to pay their taxes, sources from Albania’s General Tax Directorate said yesterday. The amount of debt related to these accounts reaches over 40 billion leks ($357 million). According to official statistics released by the Albanian Finance Ministry, the businesses’ unpaid obligations to the state are valued at 147 billion leks ($1.31 billion) as of the end of 2016.