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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Chinese economic activity surged in the first two months of 2021 when compared with the same coronavirus-battered period last year, though the picture was less rosy when weighed against growth momentum in the final months of 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported. Economic data released Monday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed industrial production, consumption, investment and home sales in January and February all jumping by more than 30% from the same period a year earlier, when the Chinese economy was largely shut down to contain the fast-spreading coronavirus.
Brazil spent more money shielding its economy from the pandemic slump than almost any other emerging nation, and quite a few wealthier ones too. It put much less effort into containing the pandemic itself, Bloomberg News reported. That combination is putting the country’s economic policy under growing strain. It’s one reason why Brazil is poised to become the first Group of 20 country to raise interest rates this year.
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A German court on Tuesday declared that a small bank tied to a collapsed U.K. finance company was insolvent, triggering losses for dozens of small German towns, the Wall Street Journal reported. Greensill Bank AG was deemed insolvent by a local court, leaving the towns as creditors that will likely sustain losses. Around Germany, at least 12 towns with a combined €200 million, equivalent to about $238 million, in deposits are in the same situation. Individual depositors are covered by insurance. Among them is Mengen, a tiny municipality in southwestern Germany.
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The European Central Bank is shielding the euro-zone economy from higher bond yields partly because the region is rolling out its fiscal stimulus too slowly, according to policy maker Peter Kazimir, Bloomberg News reported. While the rise in euro-area government bond yields this year isn’t “dramatic for now,” the Slovakian central bank governor said the ECB wanted to shore up confidence that the region wouldn’t suffer from higher borrowing costs sparked by the $1.9 trillion U.S. fiscal package. “My concern is that, compared with the enormous U.S.
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