Headlines

Qatar National Bank QPSC, the Middle East’s biggest lender, asked a U.S. court to order Eritrea to pay nearly $300 million of debt after the Horn of Africa nation refused to participate in two lawsuits, Bloomberg News reported. The Doha-based bank requested a judgment by default from a federal court in Washington on Friday after Eritrea failed to respond to the bank’s claim seeking to enforce a U.K. ruling in 2019. QNB alleges that President Isaias Afwerki’s government went to drastic lengths to avoid being served with key documents.

Australia on Tuesday eased so-called continuous disclosure laws for publicly listed companies, which will now protect companies and their officers against liabilities for misleading and deceptive statements or forecasts unless "fault" is proven, Reuters reported. The new laws come as part of a broader clamp down on the litigation funding industry following a surge in costly class action lawsuits.

Consumer prices in urban parts of Egypt rose at their fastest pace since December as food costs climbed and recent hikes of electricity and tobacco took their toll, Bloomberg News reported. The annual inflation rate accelerated to 5.4% in July compared with 4.9% the previous month, according to data from the state-run statistics agency CAPMAS on Tuesday. Prices rose 0.9% on a monthly basis, from 0.2% in June. The quickening followed increases in power bills and cigarette costs in the North African nation in recent weeks against a backdrop of surging global commodity prices.

Bayer lost a third appeal against U.S. court verdicts that awarded damages to customers blaming their cancers on use of its glyphosate-based weedkillers, leaving the German drugs and pesticides group to pin hopes for legal relief on the U.S. Supreme Court, Reuters reported. A California appeals court yesterday upheld an $86 million verdict that found Bayer responsible for a couple's cancer after using Bayer's glyphosate-based Roundup against weeds.

Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. made a new, higher bid for Kansas City Southern, looking to derail the U.S. railroad’s pending merger with rival Canadian National Railway Co. ahead of an important shareholder vote less than two weeks away, Bloomberg News reported. The offer is $300 a share, Canadian Pacific said in a statement Tuesday, or about $27 billion in equity value. While that’s higher than its original $25 billion bid from March, the new price doesn’t match the $30 billion deal that Kansas City Southern’s board accepted from Canadian National in May.

Peru’s sol rebounded from a record low after Central Bank President Julio Velarde agreed to stay in the post for another five-year term, Bloomberg News reported. Velarde, 69, has been in the role since 2006, overseeing a long period of relatively strong growth and low inflation. After a series of conversations with new Finance Minister Pedro Francke about extending his tenure, the decision was made on Monday afternoon. The sol gained 1.6% to 4.05 per dollar at 9:10 a.m. in Lima, the biggest increase in emerging markets on Tuesday.

The Piramal group has sought the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) permission to reach a settlement and issue new debentures to the foreign lenders of DHFL, in what would be the first of its kind transaction, the Economic Times of India reported. Offshore investors, some of whose identities are not readily available, had put in close to ₹850 crore in masala bonds sold by DHFL — the non-bank mortgage lender that Piramal wants to take over following a bankruptcy court ruling.

The number of Malaysians becoming bankrupt and the number of companies closing down or winding up may increase when the current moratorium on bank loans ends, two economists said, Malay Mail reported. Sunway University economics professor Yeah Kim Leng said that the loan moratorium allows financially-distressed borrowers to avoid becoming bankrupt by postponing loan repayments, but said this would mean that there could be more bankruptcies once the moratorium period ends, The Sunday Star reported today.

French economic activity almost reached pre-pandemic levels in July as businesses largely shrugged off some renewed restrictions while supply difficulties increasingly constrained production, Bloomberg News reported. Activity was between 1% and 1.5% below normal in July, the highest it’s been since the pandemic struck, according to the Bank of France’s monthly survey of 8,500 firms. While business leaders expect a similar performance in August, the share of companies reporting supply difficulties rose for the third consecutive month to 49% in July.

Private equity firms are rethinking their strategies in China as a widening regulatory crackdown on some of the country's hottest sectors forces investors to scout for bets in other industries that they hope will be less vulnerable to sudden policy changes, Reuters reported. Private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) funds are pivoting away from data-heavy, consumer-facing internet companies to sectors including semiconductors and renewable energy, industry executives said.