Headlines

Ontario's post-secondary minister says an investigator probing the financial problems at Laurentian University will issue a final report in six to eight weeks, the CBC reported. The northern Ontario school filed for creditor protection earlier this month amid what it called "unprecedented" challenges after a decade of financial strain. The Sault Ste. Marie MPP and Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Ross Romano, says the report will help the government decide next steps when it comes to the university.

For years, landlords have had the upper hand in London’s real estate market, pushing up rents as businesses clamored for prime locations near offices, tourism hot spots and transport hubs and as the city’s population grew and grew. Restaurants were often locked into leases with clauses that allowed the rent to only go up. Retailers faced increasingly exorbitant rents. Over the course of a year, the pandemic has brought a halt to this arrangement, shifting the power balance between commercial property tenants and landlords, the New York Times reported.

Ecuador bonds fell for a second day as Sunday’s presidential election threatened to throw the Latin American nation back into economic turmoil, Bloomberg News reported. With less than 1% of votes left to count, Ecuador is heading for an April runoff between leftist Andres Arauz, with almost a third of the vote, and the indigenous party’s Yaku Perez, with 20.10%. To investors’ surprise, market friendly Guillermo Lasso is third with 19.49%, according to the National Electoral Council’s latest count.

EU antitrust regulators have suspended their investigation into Aon’s $30 billion bid for Willis Towers Watson while they wait for the U.S. insurance broker to provide data required for the case, Reuters reported. The European Commission, which kicked off its probe in December because of concerns the deal to create the world’s largest insurance broker may hurt competition in major markets, said it stopped the clock on Monday.

Ukraine is hoping a post-pandemic recalibration of global supply chains will lure more investment to its battered economy, starting with European companies. Production of mattresses and furniture are already planned, Bloomberg News reported. “Asia was the world’s leading production venue,” Sergiy Tsivkach, head of the state’s UkraineInvest agency, said in an interview. “But because of the coronavirus, it became clear that long supply chains can impact contracts’ effectiveness.

The Reserve Bank of India will seek to buy more than 3 trillion rupees ($41 billion) of sovereign bonds in the next fiscal year to support the government’s borrowing plans, Bloomberg News reported. That will exceed the 3 trillion rupees the RBI is expected to spend for the current year ending March. The intention is to cap the benchmark bond yield under 6%, while narrowing its spread with the repo rate to around 150 basis points. This is the first time there’s a clear signal on how much the RBI would spend on bond purchases, as recent market selloffs test its patience.

YPF SA, Argentina’s state-run oil driller and refiner, looks set to avoid a costly default next month after it won support for a debt swap from a large creditor group, Bloomberg News reported. The so-called Ad Hoc Bondholder Group, which holds 45% of YPF’s 2021 notes, expressed support for the exchange after the company increased its cash sweetener over the weekend, according to a statement. Bonds due in 2021 rose 4.5 cents to 95 cents on the dollar as of 10:40 am in New York, the highest since Jan. 8. The company’s shares climbed as much as 6%.