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When Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the $46 billion in revenue Aditya Birla Group, walked into Indian government offices in New Delhi last week with Vodafone Group CEO Nick Read in tow, they had only one mission: to salvage their joint venture Vodafone Idea from imminent financial collapse, Nikkei Asia reported. The meeting was called because Vodafone Idea, the mobile telecom company owned 27.6% by the Birla group and 44.3% by U.K.-listed Vodafone, will require a bailout package from the Indian government and lenders if it is to survive.

German asset management company Deka Investment has taken action, and eyes further steps, to claim damages from the insolvent payment processing company Wirecard, a spokesperson for the company told IPE. Deka Investment has already notified possible claims for its invested capital in the context of the insolvency proceeding relating to Wirecard’s assets, the spokesperson added. Asked whether Deka was planning further legal action, the spokesperson said the asset management firm was in “close contact with a law firm” on possible action against other parties in the interests of its investors.

Credit Suisse Group AG said it made a $400 million payment to investors in its supply-chain finance funds that invested in Greensill products, its fourth such disbursement to clients hit by the liquidation, Bloomberg News reported. The Aug. 6 payment takes the total paid to investors in the funds to about $5.9 billion, according to an updated Q&A on the bank’s website on Tuesday. The funds’ total cash position is about $7 billion, or about 70% of assets under management when they were suspended, it said. The Aug.

August saw the lowest figure for proposed job cuts for seven years, despite the imminent end of the government's furlough scheme, BBC.com reported. Figures published by the Insolvency Service show that British employers planned 12,687 job cuts in August, a fall of 11% since July. The data suggests that the predicted surge in unemployment this autumn may be smaller than expected. At the height of the pandemic, firms proposed over 150,000 job cuts a month. Employers planning to make 20 or more staff redundant have to notify the Insolvency Service when they start the process.

Hong Kong media group Next Digital Ltd has said that it aims to go into liquidation and its board of directors has resigned to facilitate the process, Aljazeera.com reported. Next Digital is owned by jailed tycoon Jimmy Lai and was the publisher of Apple Daily, a popular pro-democracy newspaper that closed in June after its newsroom was raided by police officers investigating whether some articles breached a national security law introduced in Hong Kong by Beijing last year.

Bitcoin plunged as much as 17% to its lowest level in a month as El Salvador’s crypto rollout got off to a rocky start, Bloomberg News reported. The largest cryptocurrency fell as low as $43,050 in New York on Tuesday, tumbling more than 10% in the course of an hour, before recouping about half the losses. The Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index, which tracks some of the largest digital tokens, lost as much as 19% at one point.

Molino Cañuelas, one of Argentina's leading food producers, has filed for the local equivalent of Chapter 11 after years of disputes with creditors, the Buenos Aires Times reported. Molca, as the company is known in Argentina, could not reach an agreement with creditor financial institutions, so it was forced to request the opening of bankruptcy proceedings, the firm reported in a statement sent by email via an outsourced public relations firm. The company owes US$1.4 billion to domestic and foreign debtors, including ING Groep NV and Rabobank UA, a spokeswoman confirmed.

EY auditors in Switzerland failed to raise the alarm over multimillion-dollar jewelery purchases and approved huge payments to opaque offshore companies in the years before one of the country’s biggest ever corporate collapses, the Irish Times reported. Zeromax, a conglomerate based in the Swiss canton of Zug, had a business empire in Uzbekistan with interests ranging from textile processing to natural gas extraction that made it the Asian country’s largest employer, accounting for as much as 10 per cent of GDP.

Serbia's Bankruptcy Supervision Agency said it is offering for sale the assets of insolvent gold refiner Majdanpek at an auction on October 5, SeeNews.com reported. The starting price is set at 129.8 million dinars ($1.3 million/1.1 million euro), the Bankruptcy Supervision Agency said in a notice on Tuesday. A deposit of 51.9 million dinars which should be paid by September 28 is required in order to participate in the auction. The list of assets put up for sale includes foundries, jewelry production facilities, a chemistry and metallurgy workshop, a warehouse and office premises.

German regulators have launched an investigation into the country's biggest financial company, Allianz, after the demise of some of its U.S. investment funds last year, people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The move heightens the pressure on the insurer, which is already facing a slew of investor lawsuits over its Structured Alpha Funds and related investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).