Headlines

Turkey’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged for a second meeting on Thursday, pledging to maintain its “current” policy stance until there’s a significant drop in inflation, Bloomberg News reported. The Monetary Policy Committee left its key rate at 19% as forecast by all analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Inflation accelerated for a seventh month in April to 17.1%, spurred on by a weak lira and rising global energy prices. But new bank Governor Sahap Kavcioglu predicted the pace of price gains had peaked and would now start dropping to 12.2% by the end of 2021.

London's Court of Appeal will hear a request to revive a 5 billion pound ($6.95 billion) lawsuit against Anglo-Australian mining group BHP (BHPB.L), (BHP.AX) over a 2015 dam failure in Brazil, a court order showed, Reuters reported. Judge Nicholas Underhill has agreed to an oral hearing that could help to overturn a previous Court of Appeal decision which denied a 200,000-strong Brazilian claimant group permission to appeal against a judgment to strike out the landmark case.

The Bank of England unveiled a much brighter outlook for the British economy on Thursday, saying it would return to its prepandemic levels at the end of this year as lockdowns ended, consumers spent billions of pounds in extra savings and the vaccine rollout reduced public health worries, the New York Times reported. The central bank, in its quarterly monetary report, raised its growth forecasts and slashed its predictions for unemployment. The British economy is now projected to grow 7.25 percent this year, compared to a forecast of 5 percent growth three months ago.

Air France-KLM sales are showing little sign so far of the travel recovery it still hopes to see by summer, the airline group said on Thursday, as it posted a wider first-quarter operating loss, Reuters reported. The group also confirmed its intention to raise more capital within months - a prospect that has weighed on its shares. The stock fell 1.1% to 4.51 euros at 0850 GMT -- less than half its peak of 9.81 euros early last year before the crisis.

For decades, France’s Valdunes SAS charged premium prices for the wheels it made for high-speed trains and other rail systems around the world. That strategy changed after a Chinese state-owned industrial conglomerate bought the company in 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported. The new owner, Maanshan Iron & Steel Co. , or MA Steel, slashed prices in a bid to dominate the market. “We were told that we shouldn’t miss a single order. That was explicit,” recalled Jérôme Duchange, Valdunes’s former top executive in France.

Canadian pension fund Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMCo) has begun a strategic review of Spanish renewable energy firm Eolia, which could lead to a possible sale, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. AIMCo has hired advisers to decide on strategic options for the business that operates around 860 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy generation capacity in Spain.

The European Commission accused the U.K. of breaching the post-Brexit trade deal by introducing conditions to grant licenses to fishing boats, Politico reported. London and Paris are at loggerheads over fishing licensing arrangements for French boats fishing in the Channel Islands, but the tension escalated in the last 24 hours when both sides dispatched patrol vessels to the self-governing island of Jersey, where French fishermen had sailed to in protest. French fishermen are struggling to obtain licenses allowing them to keep working in U.K. waters, including in Jersey.

Archegos Capital is preparing for insolvency, triggered by banks’ attempts to recoup some of the $10bn they lost on its soured bets in March, the Financial Times reported. The family office run by Bill Hwang has hired restructuring advisers to assess potential legal claims from banks and to plan for a possible winding down of its operations.

Liberty Steel Group said on Wednesday that it had appointed a committee to restructure and refinance the group after Greensill Capital, its biggest lender, filed for insolvency in March, Reuters reported. The move comes after Sanjeev Gupta’s family conglomerate GFG Alliance announced that its Australian unit had agreed terms to refinance its exposure to Greensill. Liberty Steel, which is also under the GFG umbrella, said in a statement that four new board directors would form a Restructuring and Transformation Committee (RTC) to focus on fixing or selling underperforming units.

The new management of Mexican airline Interjet has hired a restructuring firm to help overcome its $1.25 billion of inherited debt as the company looks to restart operations, Bloomberg News reported. The airline, now controlled by businessman Alejandro del Valle, has brought on Mexico City-based Argoss Partners to help resolve issues with creditors via a prepackaged bankruptcy and obtain debtor-in-possession financing. Interjet plans to submit a restructuring plan to Mexico’s bankruptcy regulator for review in the coming weeks.