The Hong Kong Mortgage Corp. HKMC, the government agency set up in 1997 to promote home ownership and develop a secondary mortgage market, has mandated Merrill Lynch to arrange a multi-currency mortgage-backed securitization MBS programme.
The first offering from the program will be a Hong-Kong dollar denominated issue and is expected to launch early next year. A well-placed source told FinanceAsia that the deal would look to raise between HK$1.5 billion $192.3 million and HK$2 billion.
In what is a highly competitive market for mandates - due to the relatively small number of international securitization deals from Asia - this is a considerable fillip for Merrill Lynch.
The bank...
