Honours PLC Withdrawal of Ratings by Standard & Poor's (1521Y)

TIDMBM19

RNS Number : 1521Y

Honours PLC

17 August 2018

17 August 2018

THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONTAINS INSIDE INFORMATION FOR THE PURPOSES OF ARTICLE 7 OF THE MARKET ABUSE REGULATION (EU) 596/2014

FOR DISTRIBUTION ONLY OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES TO PERSONS OTHER THAN "U.S. PERSONS" (AS DEFINED IN REGULATION S UNDER THE UNITED STATES SECURITIES ACT OF 1933, AS AMENDED). NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN OR INTO, OR TO ANY PERSON LOCATED OR RESIDENT IN, ANY OTHER JURISDICTION WHERE IT IS UNLAWFUL TO RELEASE, PUBLISH OR DISTRIBUTE THIS ANNOUNCEMENT

HONOURS PLC

(incorporated with limited liability in England and Wales with registered number 03702189)

Announcement relating to withdrawal of ratings by Standard & Poor's

1.1 Honours notes the announcement earlier today from Standard & Poor's ("S&P") in which it announced that it would be withdrawing its rating of the Class A1 Notes, the Class A2 Notes, the Class B Notes, the Class C Notes, the Class D Notes and the Class E Notes issued by Honours.

1.2 The withdrawal of the ratings comes following a suspension of such ratings on 9 December 2016 because S&P had not received annual repayment cohort performance data. It is in fact Honours' understanding that this data had not been provided to S&P since 2013, but that S&P had not notified Capita Customer Management Limited ("Capita"), the previous administrator of the portfolio, or Link Financial Outsourcing Limited ("Link") of its need for such data until the autumn of 2016 after the migration of the portfolio from Capita to Link, by which time it was not possible to provide the data requested as the relevant underlying data had not been migrated from Capita to Link in January 2016 when Link took over the administration of the portfolio.

1.3 Since being notified of the suspension, Honours has sought, through its administrator, Link, to provide the requested data, but ,for the reason mentioned above, Link was not able to provide such data to us or to S&P.

1.4 Since then, Honours has worked with Link to procure the provision to S&P of other loan level data in order to enable S&P to perform its desired analysis but the information which was able to be supplied also has proved insufficient for S&P's purposes.

1.5 Accordingly, S&P has decided to withdraw the ratings and neither Honours nor Link is in a position to provide what S&P considers necessary to enable such ratings to be restored.

1.6 Capitalised terms in this notice shall, except where the context otherwise requires and save where otherwise defined herein, bear the meanings ascribed to them in the Transaction Master Definitions and Framework Deed between, inter alios, Honours plc (as Issuer) and Deutsche Trustee Company Limited (as the Note Trustee and the Security Trustee) dated 10 November 2006, copies of which are available for inspection during usual business hours at the offices of Honours plc set out below.

For further information, please contact:

Honours plc

Third Floor

1 King's Arms Yard

London EC2R 7AF

   Attention:          The Directors 
   Telephone:        [phone] 
   Fax:                  [phone] 
   e-mail:              [e-mail] 
   Ref:                  Honours PLC 

DISCLAIMER

This Document does not contain or constitute an offer of, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, securities to any person in the United States or in any jurisdiction to whom or in which such offer or solicitation is unlawful. The securities referred to in this Document may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration under the US Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the Securities Act) or another exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act. The offer and sale of the securities referred to in this Document has not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act. There will be no public offer of the securities in the United States.

The underlying constraint with provision of the information is that the data sets required did not form part of the data files provided by Capita to Link Financial Outsourcing Limited ("Link") on migration of the portfolio to its management in February 2016. This is because the requirement for the provision of this detailed information on the closed (i.e. non-live accounts) segment of the portfolio - to allow the production of a cohort payment analysis - was not flagged up within the migration planning process. We understand that the last version of this reporting was provided to S&P in 2013. Link has worked with Wilmington Trust to supply loan level information which should allow replication of the original analysis, but we understand that S&P were unable to complete this exercise to their satisfaction.

For reference, the servicing of the portfolio migrated to Link from Capita on Jan. 30, 2016. Capita assumed the servicer role from The Student Loans Company in 2004."

This information is provided by RNS, the news service of the London Stock Exchange. RNS is approved by the Financial Conduct Authority to act as a Primary Information Provider in the United Kingdom. Terms and conditions relating to the use and distribution of this information may apply. For further information, please contact [e-mail] or visit www.rns.com.

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August 17, 2018 04:57 ET (08:57 GMT)