Even in its demise, Irish Bank Resolution Corporation is proving its ability to cause ripples, and headaches, on other shores. It emerged this week that two international financial institutions are embroiled in legal conflict over, you've guessed it, IBRC debt. The suit is being brought in London by French bank BNP Paribas, which is accusing a New York financial house, Anchorage Capital, of reneging on a deal to buy two batches of IBRC debt which together should have fetched some $60m.

Papers lodged by BNP show that the bank says it transferred ownership of the debt to Anchorage in February but did not receive an agreed payment in return. This was around the time when IBRC was undergoing its overnight liquidation as part of the promissory notes deal. BNP is now seeking its money from Anchorage, which manages private investment funds and has a "particular focus on defaulted and leveraged issuers" – right up IBRC's street.

Pricing
The case also throws up some colour on the pricing on the debt, which had a face value of $95 million. According to the court documents as reported by Bloomberg, BNP is saying Anchorage undertook to pay $31.2 million for a batch of debt with a face value of $50 million, and $28.1 million for a second package with a face value of $45 million. That's a difference of about 37.5 per cent.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the debt markets, this week brought the sale of (sound the trumpets)"the biggest note tied to Ireland's debt since 1999", according to data compiled by the Bloomberg machine. The deal involved the sale of €50 million in five-year credit-linked notes by Italian bankers, UniCredit. Who said the market for Irish debt was dead?