Headlines

Tina Green, the ultimate owner of the failed retail group Arcadia, will pay a final £50m promised to its pension fund within days as the political outcry over the collapse of the company intensifies, the Financial Times reported. Lady Green, who is the wife of retail tycoon Philip Green, was set to make the payment in September 2021 as part of an agreement struck with The Pensions Regulator and the trustees last year. However, in a statement on Wednesday, she said the payment would be made within the next 10 days, completing the £100m commitment made at the time.

South Africa’s National Treasury and the state-owned Land and Agricultural Development Bank are being accused of dragging their heels in negotiating a rescue package for the stricken lender, leaving creditors in the dark as debt repayments loom, Bloomberg News reported. Asset managers and other lenders are yet to receive a response to their queries about financial covenants and the mechanism of a new bond program that will be 60% backed by the government, according to the country’s biggest specialist fixed-income money manager.

Prezzo, the Italian restaurant group, is being sold to real estate company Cain International, the latest in a series of casual dining chains to change ownership as the pandemic piles more pressure on an industry struggling with high debt and too much competition, the Financial Times reported. Cain, a privately held, London-based group that has invested more than $5.9bn in real estate debt and equity since it was founded in 2014, will buy the company as a going concern, it said in a statement on Wednesday.

As debt defaults for state-owned enterprises in China rise, international investors find themselves in what for most is a new place: Chinese bankruptcy courts, Bloomberg News reported in a commentary. That may be just the right venue for them, debtors and regulators to meet and take a crucial step toward a better functioning economy. Investors have been spending years to recover their money out of court, but China’s bankruptcy law has now gained enough critical mass to test in modern markets.

Argentine officials will travel to the United States on Thursday to meet with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as the country renegotiates already-disbursed loans of about $44 billion, a government source told Reuters on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The fund said at the end of November that it had begun to outline, together with Argentina, a new program to help the government face the country’s profound economic and social challenges, which have been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

European Union regulators have revived guidance to allow banks to grant a new round of loan repayment holidays to coronavirus-hit customers until March without triggering a big surge in provisioning that would crimp the flow of credit, Reuters reported. The European Banking Authority (EBA) said on Wednesday that, due to the second wave of COVID-19 infections, guidance for banks that expired on Sept. 30 was being reactivated until March 31, a move welcome by the banking industry.

British clothing retailer Bonmarche has gone into administration, putting another 1,600 jobs at risk in a grim week for the sector, Reuters reported. Philip Green’s Arcadia fashion group collapsed into administration on Monday and on Tuesday department store chain Debenhams said it was starting a liquidation process. Together 25,000 jobs are at risk. RSM Restructuring Advisory said it has been appointed as administrators of Bonmarche, which trades from 225 stores across the United Kingdom.

Shares of Evergrande Property Services fell marginally on their Hong Kong debut on Wednesday, shedding initial gains as the spinoff of China’s second-largest property developer struggled to shake off worries about debt and competition, Reuters reported. Concerns about the financial health of its parent, China Evergrande Group, have clouded Hong Kong’s third-largest listing of the year, with China’s most indebted developer planning to use half the $1.8 billion raised for its own debt repayment.

Faced with mounting debt servicing obligations, the federal government is planning to push for debt restructuring, Vanguard Media Limited reported. The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, who gave the indication while featuring on a Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, programme, yesterday, said the current debt servicing obligations were taking too much of the nation’s resources, especially at a time of low revenue generation.

Germany’s audit watchdog suspects EY partners knew they were issuing a “factually inaccurate” audit for Wirecard in 2017, according to four people familiar with the matter, the Financial Times reported. Apas, the Berlin-based audit oversight body, has reported EY to prosecutors, telling them that the firm may have acted criminally during its work for Wirecard, which collapsed into insolvency earlier this year in one of Europe’s largest fraud scandals.