Some intriguing developments in private credit this week, although not all of them could be called strictly private credit in the plain vanilla sense of the word. First, a dividend recap. It sounds a little anachronistic, no? Dividend recaps were a way for sponsors to lump more debt onto the portfolio company in order to extract a payout to shareholders, and made sense at a time when debt was cheap. But when base rates in Europe and the UK have been raised again?

Nonetheless, Blackstone is raising a €600m TLB, adding a €200m delayed draw facility, and increasing the existing RCF by €50m, in part to fund a dividend recap on Dutch solar mounting solutions provider Esdec Solar Group. Although on more of an infrastructure asset than a plain vanilla corporate private debt transaction, it’s punchy to do the recap so soon after the original investment (December 2022).