Headlines

Egypt’s headline inflation accelerated at its fastest pace since December but remained below the target range, making rising global bond yields a more important factor in next week’s rate decision, Bloomberg News reported. The annual inflation rate climbed to 4.5% in February from 4.3% in January after two consecutive months of deceleration. On a monthly basis, consumer prices inched up 0.2%, the state-run statistics agency CAPMAS said Wednesday in a report. Egypt’s central bank is due to make its next interest-rate decision on March 18.

India’s combined federal and states’ budget gap in the current fiscal year will reach 12.7% on increased healthcare spending and a collapse in revenues amid the pandemic, according to an analysis by the country’s largest commercial bank, Bloomberg News reported. State Bank of India said in a report published Wednesday that there was a sharp increase in debt in the year to March 31 as states had to borrow more given their lack of resources, with the average fiscal deficit across 13 states reaching 4.5% of gross domestic product.

Former executives at Davy who were at the heart of a bond-trading scandal that has rattled the stockbroking firm – and are still shareholders in it – are close to agreeing to allowing the remaining board members to put it up for sale, the Irish Times reported. It is expected that Davy, where former National Treasury Management Agency chief executive John Corrigan is chairman and former AIB chief executive Bernard Byrne stepped in as interim chief executive last weekend, will confirm before the weekend that the business is being put on the market.

Turkey’s sovereign wealth fund is sounding out global banks on refinancing its only syndicated loan as the institution emerges from a shakeup this week, Bloomberg News reported. The fund, known as TWF, is in talks to refinance a 1 billion-euro ($1.2 billion) loan it drew in March 2019 and which matures in five days. Abundant global liquidity and the government’s guarantee on 95% of the facility will likely help the sovereign investor close the deal.

LATAM Airlines Group, the region’s largest airline, on Tuesday reported a loss of $962.5 million in the fourth quarter, hurt by a second wave of the pandemic which has hit Latin America particularly hard, Reuters reported. LATAM filed for bankruptcy protection last May and is still going through a court-supervised reorganization in the United States. Overall in 2020, the airline lost $4.6 billion, compared with a pre-pandemic profit of $196 million in 2019.

Cryptocurrency investment platform Cred Inc. unwittingly put a convicted financial criminal identified by the U.K. as a fugitive in charge of raising and deploying the firm’s capital before its collapse into bankruptcy, a court-appointed examiner said, the Wall Street Journal reported. An examiner’s report filed Monday in the U.S.

Brexit drove a shift in Japanese firms out of the U.K. and toward continental Europe, a report shows, Politico reported. The number of Japanese firms based in the U.K. fell 12 percent between 2014 and 2019, from 1,084 to 951, with most of the drop occurring during the politically tumultuous period following the Brexit referendum in June 2016.

There are worrying signs company collapses could leap back to historical heights as pandemic-related assistance draws to a close after propping up “zombie” enterprises that would have otherwise failed, The Australian reported. CreditorWatch’s latest Business Risk Review data released on Tuesday shows external administrations spiked by 61 per cent in February – the highest they have risen for a year.

Electricity and gas provider Just Energy Group Inc said it filed for creditor protection in Canada and plans to do the same in the United States, citing massive costs from the Texas deep freeze last month, Reuters reported. It became the second Texas electricity company to take the step in the face of extraordinary electricity charges during the cold snap. Last week, Texas’ largest and oldest electric power cooperative, Brazos Electric Power Cooperative Inc, filed for bankruptcy protection in Houston, citing a disputed $1.8 billion debt to the state’s grid operator.