Headlines

About one third of the roughly 150 ships owned by companies controlled by Singapore tycoon Lim Oon Kuin and his family have been sold as part of efforts to repay billions of dollars of debt owed to creditors, Reuters reported. Accounting firm Grant Thornton, court-appointed supervisor of Xihe Holdings, put up several vessels for sale through shipbrokers in September last year. Xihe Holdings is owned by the Lim family and held the bulk of their fleet.

Interest rates have been negative in Europe for years. But it took the flood of savings unleashed in the pandemic for banks finally to charge depositors in earnest, the Wall Street Journal reported. Germany’s biggest lenders, Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank A , have told new customers since last year to pay a 0.5% annual rate to keep large sums of money with them. The banks say that they can no longer absorb the negative interest rates the European Central Bank charges them. The more customer deposits banks have, the more they have to park with the central bank.

British consumer borrowing fell at its fastest pace in January since May last year as the country went back into a coronavirus lockdown, Bank of England data showed on Monday, Reuters reported. Unsecured lending to consumers fell by 2.4 billion pounds ($3.35 billion), the biggest fall since last May’s 4.6 billion-pound drop and more than a median forecast for a 1.9 billion-pound fall in a Reuters poll of economists. That took the year-on-year fall to 8.9%, the biggest decline since monthly records began in 1994, the BoE said.

After plunging into one of the worst recessions of any major economy, India is showing signs of a modest comeback, the New York Times reported. But that recovery is uneven, and the country is still struggling to find ways to sustain growth. Its service sector is vulnerable, and the vast informal economy — which employs farmhands, day laborers, rickshaw drivers and many millions of others — remains weak as well.

A rush to quickly spend a €5 billion European Union fund aimed to counteract the economic impact of Brexit may sacrifice quality for speed, and Ireland could end up having to pay some money back, the European Court of Auditors has warned, the Irish Times reported. Ireland is in line to receive at least €1 billion of the Brexit Adjustment Reserve (BAR), by far the largest amount going to any country in the bloc due to the economy’s exposure to the impact of Britain’s exit from the EU.

The European Union will propose issuing a certificate called a Digital Green Pass that would let people who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus travel more freely, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said on Monday, the New York Times reported. “The Digital Green Pass should facilitate Europeans’ lives,” Ms. von der Leyen wrote on Twitter.

Shares in Brazilian banks were down in late afternoon trading on Monday as media reported the government will raise taxes on banks as a way to compensate for tax exemptions for fuel, Reuters reported. According to O Globo newspaper, the government will raise one of the taxes paid by banks, a contribution over net income, from 20% to 23%. The government is also planning to end some tax exemptions for vehicles and petrochemical products, the newspaper said. President Jair Bolsonaro has promised truckers to reduce diesel prices by cutting federal taxes on the fuel.

The European Central Bank “can and must react against” any unwarranted rise in bond yields that threaten to undermine the euro-area economy, policy maker Francois Villeroy de Galhau said, Bloomberg News reported. The comments by the Bank of France governor, among the strongest yet by ECB officials, encouraged investors to bet that the central bank is already stepping up its own emergency bond-buying program. While fresh data on Monday showed net purchases slowing last week, it said the figures were distorted by redemptions.

The Insolvency Service paid out £453.4 million in missing wages and benefits to workers at firms that went bust last year, according to new data, the East Ethan Courier reported. The payments made by the agency, which is part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), were at the highest levels in a decade although the various company lifelines provided by the Chancellor meant the number of firms going insolvent fell.