Signs of a turnaround at its marquee Jaguar Land Rover unit may not be enough to ease the challenges facing India’s oldest and most-storied business empire, Bloomberg News reported. The Tata Group bought the British luxury carmaker in 2008 for $2.3 billion, and it’s lately become a drag on the salt-to-software conglomerate, racking up losses in three quarters through December. Although Jaguar posted a net income of 119 million pounds ($151 million) this week, debt at owner Tata Motors Ltd.

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Belgian financial services giant KBC Group has recouped nearly a third of the €1.4 billion it injected into its Irish unit during the financial crisis to rescue the business as it grappled with mounting bad loan losses, The Irish Times reported. KBC Bank Ireland, which returned to profit in 2015, paid €183 million back by way of a dividend to its Brussels-based parent last year, a spokeswoman for the unit said. That is in addition to an initial €227 million handed over in 2017 – bringing the total to €410 million, or 29.3 per cent of its total rescue bill following the crash.

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Russia’s Antipinsky oil refinery said on Monday it had filed for bankruptcy, weeks after a London court ordered its assets be frozen in response to a lawsuit from a trading house, Reuters reported. The refinery, which has a capacity of 9 million tonnes per year, had halted operations on several occasions in recent months because of a lack of funds to pay for crude oil deliveries, according to industry sources.

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Struggling Spanish retailer DIA reached an eleventh-hour agreement to secure financing on Monday, new owner LetterOne said in a statement, staving off the imminent risk of having to start insolvency proceedings, Reuters reported. DIA’s failure to compete with domestic and foreign rivals that have invested more heavily in their stores has hit the company’s market share and left it with negative equity and towering debt.

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Jaguar Land Rover crashed to a £3.6 billion (€4.1 billion) annual loss as it was weighed down by a slump in Chinese sales, The Irish Times reported. The luxury car manufacturer, which announced 4,500 job cuts earlier this year, was heavily dragged down by a £3.3 billion (€3.7 billion) writedown in the third quarter. It slumped from a £400 million (€455 million) profit in the previous financial year as it was hit by the economic slowdown in China.

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For five years, European nations have been trying to jump-start their ailing economies with what was supposed to be a radical, short-term remedy—negative interest rates. Instead, central banks haven’t been able to wean their economies off them, The Wall Street Journal reported. Increasingly, they appear to be a permanent feature of the landscape. No major bank that introduced negative rates during Europe’s debt crisis has turned main policy rates positive again.

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Greece’s National Bank (NBG) plans to securitise three billion euros of non-performing mortgage loans by 2022, its chief executive said on Friday, as the country’s lenders battle to deal with a legacy of bad debt, Reuters reported. Non-performing exposures in the Greek banking sector totalled 81.8 billion euros ($91.3 billion) in December, which at 46.7% of their loan books is the euro zone’s highest. The government and central bank have come up with more radical initiatives involving securitisations as the urgency for Greek banks to slash their soured loans rises.

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Bonds held by the European Central Bank could become unlikely collateral damage in a battle between Spain’s largest bank and a Russian billionaire over an almost-insolvent retailer, Bloomberg News reported. The ECB is among bondholders that may be forced to take losses as a condition for Banco Santander SA to let Mikhail Fridman’s LetterOne investment fund recapitalize Distribudora Internacional de Alimentacion SA. The Bank of Spain bought DIA’s notes in 2016 as part of the ECB’s corporate bond purchase program.

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There’s a sliver of cash slipping quietly into financings for European buyouts. It’s equity but it’s dressed a bit like debt, and it comes from the opaque world of private credit, Bloomberg News reported. So-called ‘preferred equity’ is increasingly filling the funding gap when private equity firms stretch to pay a high price for a company and can’t make the sums add up. Where the combination of traditional debt and their own money won’t reach far enough to meet the acquisition price, sponsors need another source of funding. One option is to turn to providers of private credit.

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Greece’s central bank governor has warned that a package of pre-electoral handouts due to take effect next week could derail the country’s budget target agreed with its bailout creditors, the Financial Times reported. Yannis Stournaras’s warning came as parliament on Wednesday approved hastily prepared measures that the leftwing Syriza government hopes will boost its popularity ahead of EU parliament elections on May 26. The package of cuts in value added tax and a pension bonus would cost around €1bn, according to the finance ministry.

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