Headlines

Satellite operator OneWeb said on Friday it has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with $1 billion in equity investment from a consortium of the UK Government and India’s Bharti Enterprises, the new owners of the UK-based company, Reuters reported. The investment puts OneWeb on track to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the race to use low-Earth orbit satellites to provide high-bandwidth and low-latency communication services.

World Bank President David Malpass on Saturday warned G20 leaders that failing to provide more permanent debt relief to some countries now could lead to increased poverty and a repeat of the disorderly defaults seen in the 1980s, Reuters reported. Malpass said he was pleased by progress made by the Group of 20 major economies on increasing debt transparency and providing debt relief to the poorest countries, but more was needed.

Restructuring consultancy Alvarez & Marsal has pulled out of a forensic audit of Lebanon’s central bank because it did not receive information required to carry out the task, caretaker Finance Minister Ghazi Wazni told Reuters on Friday, Reuters reported. The decision is a blow to Lebanon as it attempts to extricate itself from a financial crisis, rooted in endemic waste and corruption, that has crashed its currency, paralysed banks and prompted a sovereign debt default.

COVID-19 has exposed Kenya’s debt vulnerabilities though official measures including monetary policy easing have helped shield the economy from the impact of the pandemic, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said late on Friday, Reuters reported. The Fund said it hoped a deal on a new lending facility for Kenya could be presented to its board in early 2021, noting that economic activity in the East African country was starting to pick up despite a drag from sectors such as tourism.

A Chinese court has accepted an application from a creditor of Huachen Automotive Group Holding Co Ltd seeking the restructuring of the parent of BMW AG's joint venture partner Brilliance China Automotive Holdings Ltd, Reuters reported. The Liaoning Shenyang Municipal Intermediate People’s Court accepted the application from GZ Tooling Group Co Ltd, an auto mould supplier, to restructure Huachen after the Liaoning government-owned company failed to pay mould costs and interest worth 10.2 million yuan ($1.55 million), showed a court filing published on Friday.

China’s investigation into the shock bond default by a state-owned coal miner hit shares of its listed underwriters on Friday, while shedding light on the creaking infrastructure of the country’s $4.4 trillion corporate bond market, Reuters reported. Top-rated Yongcheng Coal & Electricity Holding Group defaulted on a 1 billion yuan ($152 million) bond on November 10, stunning investors. Shares of Industrial Bank Co and China Everbright Bank fell in Shanghai on Friday after regulators said the two underwriting banks were suspected of misconduct.

Offshore oil drilling contractor Seadrill expects the market for its rigs to remain depressed until late 2021, the Oslo-listed firm said on Friday as it continued talks with creditors over a debt restructuring, Reuters reported. Seadrill, controlled by Norwegian-born billionaire John Fredriksen, in September suspended interest payments after failing to agree with lenders on amending terms for its $5.7 billion bank debt, and warned that restructuring could wipe out its equity.

Malaysia Airlines’ parent company has sought financial aid from its sole shareholder, the nation’s sovereign wealth fund, as debt restructuring talks with creditors drag on, the company said on Saturday, Reuters reported. “Malaysia Aviation Group has requested financial support from our shareholder Khazanah Nasional although the company isn’t in a position to comment on amount at this point in time,” it said in an email to Reuters. The group said it remains in talks for a restructuring and that it was targeting a commercial agreement in the first week of December.

South Africa could move toward an even deeper junk credit rating this week by losing the only stable outlook on its debt assessments, Bloomberg News reported. Of the 23 respondents in a Bloomberg survey, 12 expect S&P Global Ratings to change its outlook on the country’s credit rating to negative from stable on Friday. That means the next move from the company, which already assesses South Africa’s foreign-currency debt at three levels below investment grade, could be another downgrade. That would take the country to a single B rating and signal an increased probability of a default.

China’s central bank remains on course to taper its emergency support even as a string of defaults by government-linked companies sends tremors through the credit markets. Officials have been preparing investors about the possibility of withdrawing some of that stimulus as the economic recovery picks up pace, Bloomberg News reported. While a surge in market interest rates this week following the defaults appears to have complicated that plan, economists say it won’t push the People’s Bank of China off its policy course.