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UA Cinemas, one of Hong Kong’s biggest movie-theater chains, abruptly shut down operations in the city, citing the pressure that the pandemic had on its business, Bloomberg News reported. It will cease operations in Hong Kong with immediate effect on March 8 and court proceedings to wind up the business have begun, the company said on its website on Monday. The demise turns Hong Kong’s third-largest cinema chain into one of the city’s most high-profile casualties of the coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged businesses worldwide.
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Singapore’s High Court on Monday approved an application to wind up collapsed oil trading firm Hin Leong Trading Pte Ltd, marking the end of what was once one of Asia’s top oil traders, Reuters reported. Hin Leong, owned by Singaporean tycoon Lim Oon Kuin and his children, racked up some $4 billion in debt and entered court restructuring nearly a year ago. The company had been seeking to restructure its debts after the oil price crash last year when Lim admitted in a court document to directing the firm not to disclose hundreds of millions of dollars in losses over several years.
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Ireland’s top securities firm closed its bond desk and said all those involved in a deal which has plunged the company into controversy have now exited, as it sought to draw a line under the worst scandal to hit Dublin’s stockbroking community in decades, Bloomberg News reported. Four staff were made redundant by the closure, Davy said. The move comes after a central bank investigation prompted the nation’s debt office to strip the firm its role as a primary dealer in government bonds on Monday.
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Tunisia’s state-owned firms are in dire straits, facing a perfect storm of debt, mismanagement, the coronavirus pandemic and a decade of political instability that could push some to bankruptcy, Agence France Presser's reported. Ten years since a revolution that overthrew the nepotistic regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the sweeping reforms economists say are needed to clean up state finances have yet to materialise. The situation has pushed many of the cash-strapped North African country’s 110 state-owned firms towards the edge.
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Lebanon's caretaker prime minister warned Saturday that the country was quickly headed toward chaos and appealed to politicians to put aside differences in order form a new government that can attract desperately needed foreign assistance, the Associated Press reported. Hassan Diab, who resigned almost seven months ago as prime minister, threatened to suspend his caretaker duties if that would increase pressure for a new Cabinet to be formed.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has never been short of criticisms about his predecessor’s legacy. But he has reserved a special contempt for the sweeping overhaul that opened Mexico’s tightly held energy industry to the private sector, the New York Times reported. He has called the changes a form of legalized “pillaging,” the product of corruption and a resounding failure. He has suggested that some foreign energy investors are “looting” the nation and that Mexican lawyers who work for them are guilty of treason.
Over more than a decade, the Japanese central bank, uniquely among its global peers, has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into local equities and now owns about 7% of all the shares traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s first section. With stock prices near a 30-year high in Japan, shares bought by the central bank years ago have surged in value, the Wall Street Journal reported. Instead of winning praise for its investing acumen, though, the Bank of Japan faces growing pressure to stop acting like the Tokyo whale and find ways to spread the wealth.
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Credit Suisse is winding down specialist funds worth $10bn (£7.2bn) that were mostly invested in loans linked to Greensill, the crisis-hit supply chain bank, The Guardian reported. Greensill, which employs 1,000 staff in London and has the former prime minister David Cameron as an adviser, is preparing to file for insolvency and is in talks to sell parts of its business to the US private equity firm Apollo Global Management, after it lost the of backing of Credit Suisse and its fellow Swiss investment house GAM. “The fund boards have now decided to terminate the funds.
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Bankers are worried that there will be a flood of applications at the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) after the government suspension of insolvency proceedings ends on March 25 of this year. Some resolution cases like Future Retail could get derailed if operational creditors initiate insolvency proceedings. A section of bankers feels that the government can use the leeway under the amendment and extend the suspension up to June 2021. As part of its Cover relief measures, the government had issued on June 25 a notification to suspend insolvency proceedings by six months.
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Blockchain payments firm Ripple has not experienced any fallout in its Asia Pacific business after being sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company’s chief executive officer said on Friday, Reuters reported. In late December, the SEC charged Ripple, which is associated with cryptocurrency XRP, with conducting a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering. After that, the top U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase shut down trading in XRP, which is the world’s seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market value.