Headlines

Avianca Holdings SA plans to add dozens of routes using smaller aircraft as it plots its emergence from bankruptcy later this year, the airline’s chief executive said, Bloomberg News reported. Colombia’s largest carrier is expanding with 50 direct routes between secondary cities in coming years, said CEO Anko van der Werff in an interview. Using narrow-body planes, it will target tourist spots such as Punta Cana, Cartagena and Cancun, offering a new level of cheaper fares to capture demand for leisure travel that’s leading a rebound after the pandemic crippled the airline business.

The fall in French corporate insolvencies during the coronavirus pandemic reflects extensive government support that has masked disparate performances among SMEs, as has the stability of corporates’ aggregate net debt, according to a Fitch Ratings report. Fitch expects arrears and defaults among SMEs to increase as support is withdrawn and this is reflected in the firm's French SME CLO performance expectations, which already incorporate pandemic-related stresses.

Pakistan has hired banks for a possible foreign-currency bond offering, Bloomberg News reported. The government has mandated Deutsche Bank AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group AG, Standard Chartered Plc and Emirates NBD Bank PJSC. The South Asian nation is looking to raise funds after reaching an agreement with the International Monetary Fund on resumption of a $6 billion bailout program that was secured in 2019 to avoid bankruptcy. Pakistan is also separately planning to issue a $500 million green note in the next few months to help boost its development of hydroelectric power.

Up to 1,500 former Thomas Cook workers are in line for awards of thousands of pounds each following an employment tribunal judgement, the TSSA announced today, the Morning Star reported. The transport union said that a decision on the collapsed travel firm’s failure to consult before making redundancies opens the way for former employees to claim as much as £4,200 each from the Insolvency Service.

Greece attracted bumper demand in its first sale of 30-year bonds since 2008, completing the country’s full return to debt markets, Bloomberg News reported. The nation drew in more than 26 billion euros ($31 billion) of orders for its 2.5 billion-euro sale via banks. That showed investors’ long-term confidence and appetite for a yield at nearly 2% that is the highest in the euro area. The demand, just shy of a record set earlier this year, allowed Greece to cut pricing by 10 basis points from initial guidance.

Japan is temporarily raising tariffs on U.S. beef imports as volumes have exceeded levels agreed to between the two nations for the fiscal year ending on March 31, Japan’s agriculture ministry said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. From Thursday, the tariff will rise to 38.5% from 25.8% for 30 days through April 16, marking the first time the safeguard measure has been imposed on U.S. beef imports since August 2017. Japan imported a total of 242,229 tonnes of U.S. beef by early March, exceeding the maximum 242,000 tonnes set under the Japan-.U.S.

Polish central bank has ramped up its quantitative-easing program, buying the most debt at a single auction since July in a bid to keep a lid on borrowing costs, Bloomberg News reported. The purchases worth 3.75 billion zloty ($968 million) included 1.5 billion zloty of notes issued by state-run lender BGK and seven series of government bonds maturing from 2024 to 2030, according to auction results published on the National Bank of Poland’s page on Bloomberg.

Germany’s financial regulator Bafin has submitted a filing to a court in Bremen to start insolvency proceedings for Greensill Bank, a spokeswoman for the court said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Greensill Bank was locked down by BaFin this month with a warning that there was an imminent risk that its debt would become unmanageable. The regulator also questioned some of the bank’s financial accounts. “We received an application from BaFin yesterday (Monday) evening to open insolvency proceedings regarding Greensill Bank AG,” a spokeswoman for the district court told Reuters.

A Chinese court has ruled that HNA Group's corporate management was "highly mixed up" and more than 300 of its affiliates did not function as independent companies, Nikkei Asia reported. The People's High Court of Hainan Province in the civil case involving the once highflying conglomerate also decided to treat the group as a single entity in its bankruptcy proceedings going forward. The court disclosed late on Monday that it would pursue the restructuring procedures by consolidating the parent HNA Group with 320 of its affiliates.