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A group of owners of Thames Water’s riskier class B bonds have offered to provide the utility with emergency financing that they say could cost £380mn less over 12 months than a deal the company tentatively agreed last week.
The detailed proposal from class B bondholders comes after Thames Water announced on Friday that it had reached an initial deal with another group of bondholders — who are owners of its safer class A debt — to provide £3bn to allow it to avoid renationalization next year.
Thames Water, the UK’s largest water and sewerage provider serving 16mn households in and around London, is struggling with a £19bn debt load and has warned that it could run out of cash by Christmas.
The deal with the class A bondholders would charge Thames 9.75 per cent in interest a year. The money would be provided in two tranches: an initial £1.5bn to last until October 2025.
A further £1.5bn would be released if regulator Ofwat does not allow Thames Water to increase bills by as much as it wants to and does not agree to other terms.
The group of class B bondholders have tabled an alternative offer to provide the £3bn up front at an annual interest rate of 8 per cent, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.
The group includes specialist credit fund Polus Capital Management and asset manager BlackRock.
Creditors representing £6.7bn of Thames’s class A debt have already signed up to provide the initial £1.5bn of emergency financing, while the group of B bondholders are awaiting official sign off to finance their offer.
The class B bondholders estimate that under the original offer, Thames Water would pay £643mn in a combination of interest payments, early repayment fees, and other costs over 12 months. This rival group says their proposal involves an equivalent payment of only £260mn.
With both offers, the £3bn of debt would be issued on a “super senior” basis, putting it ahead of all existing debt in an insolvency or “special administration” — a form of nationalization.
The outline of the class B bondholder offer was initially provided last week in a much less detailed document.
As well as charging lower interest, the class B proposal has a lower “original issue” discount — when lenders are charged less than the face value of the bond — and charges a lower fee for early repayment.
For any deal to go ahead, Thames Water would need 75 per cent of both classes of bondholders to agree.
Thames Water said on Friday that its other class A and class B bondholders “will have the opportunity to participate” in the £3bn super senior emergency loan offered by the class A bondholders.
Thames Water and the two bondholder groups declined to comment.
Thames Water is separately seeking to raise at least £3bn of equity from investors after its existing shareholders, a group of pension and sovereign wealth funds, said this year that the business was uninvestable and refused to inject more money.