Another front has opened up in the Pacific telecom cold war, with the Australian government committing to fund Telstra's acquisition of debt-laden Digicel Pacific, Lightreading.com reported. Telstra has confirmed it is in talks with local management of the Digicel Group, a Jamaica-headquartered firm that runs around 30 small telcos in the Caribbean, Central America and the south Pacific. The operator said in a statement Monday that the Australian government had promised to provide most of the funds should a deal be reached.

Garuda Indonesia posted a net loss of $2.4 billion in 2020, with its auditor raising concerns over the continuity of the Southeast Asian country's flagship airline, Nikkei Asia reported. The net loss is Garuda's biggest since at least 2005, the oldest available data on Quick-Factset, and marks a staggering increase from the $38.9 million loss it reported the previous year. The figures, posted to the Indonesian Stock Exchange late Friday, further highlight the dire situation the company faces.

The Shenzhen Intermediate People's Court in South China's Guangdong Province on Monday granted a personal application for bankruptcy protection, the first such case since relevant laws went into effect in March, the Global Times reported. The application was filed by Liang Wenjin, a local entrepreneur in the Bluetooth earphone industry whose company went bankrupt due to unstable sales and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Realty developers Mantra Properties and Ashdan Developers are in fray to acquire Pune-based real estate developer D S Kulkarni Developers through the ongoing insolvency process with separate bids of over Rs 800 crore each, the Economic Times of India reported. While Mantra Properties has bid Rs 880 crore, Ashdan Developers has bid Rs 827 crore in the third revision of their plans to acquire the debt-laden company and its projects. The Committee of Creditors (CoC) is expected to take a final call on both the resolution plans this week.

India's central bank has ordered Mastercard to stop adding new customers for failing to comply with the country's data storage rules, escalating a dispute between Indian authorities and U.S. financial services groups over the control of customer data, the Financial Times reported. The Reserve Bank of India said that Mastercard had not complied with rules introduced in 2018 that bar payment companies from transferring customer data overseas. The regulations, which were fiercely resisted by U.S. payment companies, required all financial data to be stored exclusively in India.