The 2007 takeover of the Dutch parts of Yukos Oil by Russian state oil company Rosneft’s former subsidiary Promneftstroy was illegal, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled on Friday, upholding an earlier lower appeals court ruling. Yukos Oil went bankrupt in 2006 after its former chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, fell out with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Russian government began demanding billions in back taxes, Reuters reported. Most of Yukos’ assets were absorbed by the Kremlin’s flagship oil producer Rosneft, and its former owners have for years been trying to recover their possessions.

Brazil’s recent change of government has further delayed the long-awaited finalization of LyondellBasell Industries NV’s plan to buy Brazilian petrochemical company Braskem SA, three sources with knowledge of the matter said this week, Reuters reported. Netherlands-based LyondellBasell first said it had entered into exclusive talks to acquire control of Braskem from Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht SA in June. However, the deal’s price depends on a long-term naphtha supply contract with state-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro SA, which also owns shares in Braskem.

A Scottish shopping centre owned by a global asset manager is up for auction with a starting price of £1, in the latest sign of the downturn in the retail property market, the Financial Times reported. The Postings centre in Kirkcaldy, owned by a pension fund run by Columbia Threadneedle Investments, is being auctioned through Allsop with a reserve price of £1 — implying a gross initial yield of 15.6m per cent, according to the auctioneer’s website. The sale comes as a crisis on the high street begins to eat into retail property values.

Some of the UK’s biggest listed landlords face rent cuts as Debenhams seeks to ease the burden of a store portfolio that includes leases stretching as far as 2083, the Financial Times reported. British Land and Intu have the largest exposure to the struggling retailer, according to data from Colliers International, although people close to both companies insisted their stores were among Debenhams’ most successful. Other groups with significant exposure include Landsec, Capital & Regional and Hammerson, the data shows.

Shareholders in the company that owns Patisserie Valerie are increasingly concerned that the café chain could be sold cheaply or even put into administration after it warned that its accounting problems ran deeper than initially thought, the Financial Times reported. Patisserie Holdings is in urgent talks with its lenders HSBC and Barclays to extend a financing agreement beyond its scheduled expiry on Friday and has retained KPMG to “review all options available” to recover and preserve value.

Germany is examining whether it can fix its two largest lenders -- Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG -- by combining them into a national champion that’s once again able to challenge foreign rivals, Bloomberg News reported. History suggests it’s a recipe for more trouble. Spain encouraged the merger of seven failed savings banks into Bankia SA in 2010, only to bail out the combined entity two years later when it collapsed. The U.K. pressed Lloyds Banking Group Plc to swallow failing HBOS Plc in 2008 and a month later had to rescue Lloyds. The U.S.

An Garda Síochána are investigating a series of loans raised on peer-to-peer lending websites last year after a Co Kerry company closed its doors without repaying its six-figure debts, The Irish Times reported. The company, Premier Irish Golf Tours, raised several hundred thousand euro on crowdfunding websites last summer. The websites connect individual lenders with businesses that want to raise money. Correspondence sent to the lenders on one of the sites, Linked Finance, shows that the Garda are investigating the company after a complaint by the website.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney on Wednesday likened the $2 trillion (£1.55 trillion) leveraged loan market to subprime mortgages that defaulted 10 years ago and triggered a global financial crisis, in a warning to MPs, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Leveraged loans are made to companies that are highly indebted, and growth has been driven by investment funds and collateralised loan obligations (CLOs) linked to the loans. "We are concerned just because the pace of growth has been quite rapid for some time," Carney told the MPs.

Should a country embrace buyout groups with a growing appetite for its assets or repel them as rapacious capitalism on fears of job cuts and short financial gains? That’s the question facing Spain — which for the greater part of the past decade has suffered a steep economic crisis — as it finds itself luring a growing number of buyout funds looking to snap up assets, according to DD’s Javier Espinoza, the Financial Times reported.

A prominent South African fund manager stands to become one of the biggest losers on a batch of New Look’s bonds that were in effect rendered worthless when the UK retailer launched a debt restructuring this week, the Financial Times reported. New Look set out terms of a debt-for-equity swap on Monday that will hand one-fifth of the company to so-called senior secured bondholders — owners of debt linked to specific assets. Meanwhile, holders of £176m of unsecured bonds have been offered just 2 per cent of the equity in the struggling fashion retailer.