Headlines

Virgin Australia said on Wednesday it had restructured its order for Boeing Co 737 MAX planes, reducing the number on order to 25 from 48 and delaying the first deliveries by two years to mid-2023, Reuters reported. Australia’s second-biggest airline, now owned by U.S. private equity group Bain Capital, said in a statement it would take 25 of the largest variant, the 737 MAX 10, but not the 23 smaller 737 MAX 8s it had ordered previously. Bain’s purchase of Virgin closed last month, allowing the airline to exit from voluntary administration, Australia’s closest equivalent to U.S.

South Africa started a fresh battle with labor groups in its effort to revive the bankrupt state airline, offering three months of wages to employees who haven’t been paid since March, Bloomberg News reported. The government’s Department of Public Enterprises and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa agreed to discuss the matter later on Tuesday, according to a spokeswoman for the labor group. Numsa and the South African Cabin Crew Association, another union, had expected members to be paid in full, in line with the country’s legal framework for a business-rescue process.

Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank provided the bulk of the funding for Wirecard’s acquisition of a pair of Indian companies referred to in the fraud allegations against the defunct Germany payments group, documents seen by the Financial Times reveal. In 2015 Wirecard turned to the German banks when it agreed to pay up to €340m to a Mauritius-based fund for two India-based sister companies, Hermes i Tickets and GI Technology, the Financial Times reported.

Tianqi Lithium Corp. plans to sell a minority stake in the world’s biggest lithium mine, giving the producer access to the cash it needs to repay the major loan behind its ballooning financial troubles, Bloomberg News reported. Australian miner IGO Ltd. will pay $1.4 billion in cash for a 49% stake in Tianqi Lithium Energy Australia Pty, the majority shareholder in the Greenbushes mine in the country’s west, according to a statement to the Shenzhen Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

Eurozone governments’ borrowing has rocketed to fund their response to the coronavirus pandemic, reigniting longstanding calls for the European Central Bank to ease debt burdens by forgiving sovereign bonds it owns, the Financial Times reported. The proposal was floated by academic economists as an answer to the single currency area’s last debt crisis in 2012. Senior Italian officials have recently stirred up the idea once more, suggesting the ECB could forgive debt bought through its asset purchase programme or swap it for perpetual bonds, which are never repaid.

Argentina’s Buenos Aires province has extended an already-delayed deadline to Jan. 4 for bondholders to agree a deal to restructure some $7 billion in foreign debt, the local government said in a statement late on Monday, Reuters reported. The extension comes as the latest deadline came and went on Friday without an agreement with its creditors. “The Ministry of Finance will continue to dialogue in good faith with external private creditors,” the district said in the statement announcing the extension on its website.

Zambian authorities formally requested a financing arrangement from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Fund said on Tuesday, to help the southern African copper producer navigate a debt crisis, Reuters reported. Zambia became Africa’s first pandemic-era sovereign default last month after it failed to pay a $42.5 million coupon on one of its Eurobonds. Zambia’s presidency released a photo of President Edgar Lungu meeting with the head of the IMF’s Africa department Abebe Selassie in the capital Lusaka on Tuesday.

Norwegian Air was given additional creditor protection by a court in Norway on Tuesday on top of that granted by an Irish judge on Monday, allowing the cash-strapped airline’s restructuring efforts to continue, Reuters reported. “A supplementary reconstruction process under Norwegian law will be to the benefit of all parties and will increase the likelihood of a successful result,” Chief Executive Jacob Schram said. Norwegian said it could now move forward with the dual-track process.

The Pound to Euro (GBP/EUR) exchange rate plummeted by -1% today, with the pairing currently fluctuating around €1.096, Future Currency Forecast reported. The Pound (GBP) fell today following comments from the European Union’s Chief Negotiator, Michel Barnier, who outlined a ‘very gloomy’ assessment of trade negotiations between the two sides.

Relations between the United States and China promise to be fraught even under President-elect Joe Biden’s administration, Bloomberg News reported in a commentary. There’s one area where the two rivals can and should cooperate immediately, however: to head off a looming debt crisis that threatens to hurl millions into poverty across Africa, Latin America and Asia. When many of the world’s poorest countries last found themselves unable to service their debts 25 years ago, the U.S. led a global effort — the 1996 Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative — to forgive much of that debt.