A former Swiss banker has pleaded guilty in Miami federal court to helping launder $1.2 billion of money embezzled from Venezuela’s bankrupt state oil company in a scheme that involved close relatives of a Venezuelan official, The Wall Street Journal reported. People familiar with the case say that official is President Nicolás Maduro. Matthias Krull, a 44-years-old Panama-based former Swiss bank executive, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering on Wednesday, the Justice Department said. As part of his plea, Mr.

The U.K. government said it will move forward with plans to punish directors who fail to safeguard their workers from the effects of a company’s bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. New powers announced Sunday will be given to the U.K. Insolvency Service, including the ability to issue fines or even disqualifications to company bosses if they are found to have tried to avoid paying a dissolved company’s debts.

A proposed deal for an Irish business family to buy discount retailer Poundworld out of administration in the United Kingdom has collapsed in acrimony, The Irish Times reported. Deloitte, administrators to the chain in the UK, said that the Dublin-based Henderson family had agreed a “deal in principle” earlier this month to buy a tranche of stores in an eleventh hour agreement before they were shuttered.

Smurfit Kappa has defended itself after the Venezuelan government took temporary control of the Irish cardboard boxmaker’s subsidiary in the South American country, which is in economic freefall and recording hyperinflation, The Irish Times reported. Local reports have said that the government seized Smurfit Kappa Carton de Venezuela for three months, amid complaints about prices that the company is charging for packaging products in an alleged abuse of its dominant market position.

The number of insolvencies in the first semester of this year got to the lowest level of the last ten years, but the amount of losses generated to creditors edges close to a 10-year record, Business Review reported. The number of large companies with a turnover over EUR 1 million becoming insolvent registered a growth of almost 5 percent, reaching 189 insolvent companies in the first semester of the current year. Increasing insolvency among large companies is a systemic problem as they spread greater financial and social shock in the already highly polarized business environment.

The European Central Bank has become increasingly confident that it can wean the euro zone off some of its crisis-era support without endangering the region’s economy, The Irish Times reported. According to minutes published on Thursday from the July 26th meeting of the bank’s governing council, the euro zone was set to grow at a “solid pace”, with the risks to the outlook “broadly balanced” despite the threat of a global trade war. The ECB remains on track to end its €2.5 trillion quantitative easing programme by the end of 2018.

Eurozone businesses have tempered their expectations about the pace of future growth according to a closely-watched survey of executives, with fears of a global trade war weighing particularly heavily on the manufacturing sector, the Financial Times reported. The flash reading of the August purchasing managers’ index, compiled by IHS Markit, showed indicators of current activity, employment and price gauges for the single currency area, “remained elevated”.

On October 27, 1997, the S&P 500 fell nearly 7 per cent as contagion from Asia’s currency crisis spread globally. About a year later, Russia’s debt default and the collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management sparked a 20 per cent decline in the S&P 500. In August 2015, fears of a hard landing in China, following a surprise 2 per cent devaluation in the currency, led the S&P 500 into correction territory, the Financial Times reported in a commentary.

The British government issued its first contingency plans on Thursday for leaving the European Union without an agreement, seeking to prepare the public for possible disruptions without spreading alarm that could undermine support for the entire undertaking, the International New York Times reported. The government emphasized that it hoped and expected to hammer out a deal with the European Union.

Ireland’s banks have intensified a drive to offload soured loans from the financial crisis as regulators increase pressure on the sector to accelerate the repairing of balance sheets still burdened by bad lending practices before the crash, the Financial Times reported. Under the scrutiny of the European Central Bank and domestic authorities, Irish lenders have recently sold non-performing loans with a gross value of about €6.5bn to US investment vehicles owned by Cerberus, Goldman Sachs and Lone Star Funds.