U.K. businesses owned by ethnic minorities risk missing out on the post-pandemic economic rebound, exacerbating existing inequalities that were exposed by the coronavirus, Bloomberg News reported. A survey by the British Business Bank in October found 61% of Asian and other minority-owned enterprises had paused or permanently stopped work because of Covid-19. The figure was one and a half times that for White-owned businesses.
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Resources Per Country
- Albania
- Austria
- Belarus
- Belgium
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bulgaria
- Croatia
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Gibraltar
- Greece
- Guernsey
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Ireland
- Isle of Man
- Italy
- Jersey
- Kosovo
- Latvia
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Macedonia
- Malta
- Moldova
- Monaco
- Montenegro
- Netherlands
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Russia
- San Marino
- Serbia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Ukraine
- United Kingdom
- Vatican City
The ECB’s massive bond-buying programme has fuelled a bonanza in euro zone sovereign debt, with some investors vastly overstating their orders at debt sales in a bid to secure the coveted paper. But now some governments are starting to say, enough is enough, Reuters reported. Borrowers including the European Union, France and Spain are moving to rein in orders from hedge funds in their syndicated bond sales, a government official and four banking sources involved in the deals told Reuters.
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The lawyer handling the insolvency of Greensill Capital’s bank in Germany has asked his counterparts in the U.K. and Australia to cooperate on sifting through what’s left of the supply chain finance firm, Bloomberg News reported. The administrators should work together on securing and managing the firm’s assets, according to a spokesman for Michael Frege, the lawyer handling the insolvency of Greensill Bank AG. Frege filed a lawsuit in London to safeguard the legal position of the bank, the spokesman said Wednesday. The case was filed earlier this week, according to court records.
German towns and cities are pulling money from small, private banks, spooked after losing millions in the closure of Greensill Bank, an experience they said has shattered their faith in the country’s government and financial system, Reuters reported. Part of financier Lex Greensill’s insolvent Greensill Capital, the bank collapsed this month and triggered a 2 billion euro ($2.34 billion) bill for Germany’s deposit protection scheme. But towns and cities are excluded from this shield and are nursing losses of hundreds of millions of euros.
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Credit Suisse Group AG is seeking to push one of Sanjeev Gupta’s key commodities-trading units into insolvency, presenting a new threat to his metal empire after the collapse of his biggest lender, YahooFinance reported. The application to wind up Liberty Commodities Ltd. was filed in the U.K.’s insolvency court late Tuesday by a unit of Citigroup Inc. Citi was acting under instructions from Credit Suisse, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
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On Friday, 26 March 2021, the Belgian Insolvency Law was amended with the introduction of a pre-packaged insolvency procedure, allowing the debtor to discretely prepare for judicial reorganisation proceedings under the supervision of a judicial administrator, according to an analysis on JDSupra.com. Other noteworthy changes include (i) a lower threshold for the opening of judicial reorganisation proceedings, and (ii) the more flexible appointment of judicial administrators.
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France and Italy are set to extend virus restrictions as Europe struggles to contain a sharp increase in infections due to new variants, Bloomberg News reported. The resurgence in the outbreak is a setback for governments, whose plans to get life back to normal and revive their economies have already been stymied by a slow vaccine rollout across the European Union. The French virus spike has been particularly bad, and Germany and Spain last week imposed border restrictions to travelers coming from the country. French President Emmanuel Macron is due to address the nation at 8 p.m.
The Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 introduced a number of temporary changes to UK insolvency laws last year, according to a commentary in the National Law Review. Those changes, together with other measures such as the moratorium on forfeiture proceedings have recently been extended, we assume, to avoid the perceived cliff edge of insolvencies that might follow if such measures are brought to an end abruptly.
A $40 million potential fraud that threatens to wipe out a chunk of OSB Group Plc’s profits is linked to a client with a niche business line: piano leasing, Bloomberg News reported. The British lender has filed to place Duet Capital (Holdings) Ltd. into administration, a form of U.K. bankruptcy, and contacted the Financial Conduct Authority about the suspected fraud, according to a corporate filing and people familiar with the matter.
The European Central Bank must be cautious when it shifts away from its emergency stimulus even if the economy rebounds from the pandemic as predicted, according to outgoing policy maker Vitas Vasiliauskas, Bloomberg News reported. The Governing Council member and head of Lithuania’s central bank, who steps down from those roles next month, said in an interview that the ECB should draw on its earlier experiences of tightening too soon. That means switching back to more-standard monetary tools only gradually.
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