Headlines

InterCement Participacoes SA, the cash-strapped Brazilian cement maker, filed for bankruptcy protection at a court in São Paulo, capping months of talks with creditors after skipping debt payments, Bloomberg News reported. The filing in Brazil became “the most appropriate option” to ensure the continuity of InterCement’s restructuring efforts, the firm said in the late Tuesday filing. Its parent company Mover Participacoes and subsidiaries are also part of the request.

South Korea's finance ministry said on Wednesday it was ready to deploy "unlimited" liquidity into financial markets after President Yoon Suk Yeol lifted a martial law declaration he imposed overnight that pushed the won to multi-year lows, Reuters reported. The announcement came after Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok and Bank of Korea Governor Rhee Chang-yong held emergency talks overnight, and as the central bank board abruptly met to approve rescue measures for the local credit market.

The chief content officer of troubled Indian tech firm Byju’s and an ally of the company’s founder face financial sanctions in the US for their roles in stripping software, cash and other assets from businesses under court supervision, Bloomberg News reported. A federal judge is considering imposing millions of dollars in sanctions on Byju’s manager Vinay Ravindra and company ally Rajendran Vellapalath, who founded Dubai-based tech startup Voizzit Technology. At a court hearing yesterday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John T.

Insolvent tycoon Rene Benko remains free to defend himself against multiple international criminal investigations after Austrian authorities said they couldn’t comply with an Italian arrest warrant, Bloomberg News reported. Austrian officials had questioned the founder of the Signa retail and property conglomerate, and released him under investigation, a spokesman for the Innsbruck prosecutors said by email. With several parallel investigations, Austrian authorities cannot comply with a European arrest warrant, he said, adding that Benko wasn’t required to post bail.

Mastercard has reached an agreement in principle to settle a collective London lawsuit brought on behalf of British consumers over card fees, it said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The global payments processor was facing a lawsuit brought by consumer champion Walter Merricks on behalf of approximately 46 million adults in the United Kingdom. The case became the first mass consumer action to be approved in the UK in 2021 after a nearly five-year journey from the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to the UK Supreme Court and back.

The world economy is set for steady growth in the next two years if resurgent protectionism does not derail a recovery in global trade, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The world economy is poised to grow 3.2% this year and 3.3% in 2025 and 2026 as lower inflation, job growth and interest rate cuts help offset fiscal tightening in some countries, the OECD said in its latest Economic Outlook.

Business activity across the euro zone fell sharply last month as the bloc's dominant services sector joined the manufacturing sector in contracting, according to a survey which showed a broadbased decline, Reuters reported. HCOB's final composite Purchasing Managers' Index for the currency union, compiled by S&P Global and seen as a good gauge of overall economic health, sank to 48.3 in November from October's 50.0. That was slightly ahead of a 48.1 preliminary estimate but still firmly below the 50 mark separating growth from contraction.

Australia’s economy would have contracted sharply in the third quarter had it not been for a wave of state and federal government spending keeping it afloat, Treasurer Jim Chalmers said on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported. The commodity-rich economy grew 0.3% sequentially in the quarter and 0.8% from a year earlier, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said, with government spending adding 0.6 percentage points to growth. “Without the contribution from public final demand the economy would have gone backwards,” Chalmers told reporters.

The Canadian government rolled out C$49 billion ($34.8 billion) in loans to businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic without “due regard for value for money,” the country’s auditor general said, Bloomberg News reported. About C$3.5 billion was paid out to more than 77,000 ineligible businesses that applied to the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA), Karen Hogan concluded in a report on Monday. That’s 9% of the nearly 900,000 Canadian businesses that received loans through the program, which was introduced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government in 2020.