Headlines

India’s Jet Airways would be acquired by an investor consortium under a multi-million dollar resolution plan approved by the carrier’s creditors on Saturday, Reuters reported. The plan submitted by a consortium of London-based Kalrock Capital and UAE-based businessman Murari Lal Jalan comes after months of talks over the airline’s future and was confirmed in a regulatory filing, which gave no details of the deal. A source close to the situation said the new owners had agreed to pump in 10 billion rupees ($136 million) as working capital for the revival of the airline.

Some of the world’s top economies could see their credit ratings cut or put on downgrade warnings in the coming months in a second global wave of coronavirus-related revisions, S&P Global’s top sovereign analyst has warned, Reuters reported. S&P’s sovereign group managing director Roberto Sifon-Arevalo told Reuters that the immense costs of supporting health systems, firms and workers through the pandemic was fundamentally altering some countries’ finances for the worse.

Singapore’s efforts to promote itself as a global restructuring hub have been hit by a court’s decision to grant a distressed water company an unprecedented string of extensions as it battles to avoid liquidation, the Financial Times reported. A court in the city-state said on Friday that the next hearing in the case of Hyflux would take place on November 16 following a decision on Wednesday to grant the water management group a 12th adjournment. The Singaporean company has become saddled with S$2.7bn ($2bn) in unsecured debt after years of soaring growth came to a halt.

Long-haul, low-cost carrier AirAsia X Bhd has run out of money and needs to raise up to 500 million ringgit ($120.60 million) to restart the airline, deputy chairman Lim Kian Onn said in a newspaper interview published on Saturday, Reuters reported. The Malaysian airline, the long-haul arm of AirAsia Group Bhd, said this month it wanted to restructure 63.5 billion ringgit ($15.32 billion) of debt and slash its share capital by 90% to continue as a going concern. “We have run out of money,” Lim told The Star newspaper.

Thailand’s central bank will not extend a broad-based debt moratorium but will introduce targeted measures to help debtors affected by the coronavirus pandemic, an assistant governor said on Friday, Reuters reported. Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy posted its deepest contraction in over two decades in the second quarter and the pandemic has battered tourism and domestic activity. The central bank will monitor the situation closely and did not expect rapid and large defaults after the six-month debt holiday ended on Thursday, Assistant Governor Roong Mallikamas told a briefing.

France plans to raise 20 billion euros ($23 billion) in quasi-equity loans for small firms hit by the coronavirus crisis by offering investors a state guarantee against the first 2 billion euros in losses, officials said, Reuters reported. Fearing failures among firms which were already saddled with record levels of debt before the crisis, the French government wants the programme up and running by early next year as it battles the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The head of the International Monetary Fund on Sunday called for significant steps to address the increasingly unsustainable debt burdens of some countries, urging creditors and debtors to start restructuring processes sooner rather than later, Reuters reported. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said a six-month extension of the Group of 20 major economies’ freeze in official bilateral payments would help low-income countries hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic, but more urgent action was needed.

Europe’s economy is sliding towards a double-dip recession, with economists warning that rising coronavirus infections and fresh government restrictions on people’s movement are likely to cut short the region’s recent recovery, the Financial Times reported. Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have all announced measures in the past week to contain the second wave of Covid-19 infections, with more expected in the coming days. Belgium on Sunday announced the closure of all bars and cafés for four weeks, while Switzerland widened its mandate for wearing masks.

Countries do not usually gain friends when telling creditors they can’t pay them back. Yet Ecuador earned serious plaudits as it went about restructuring $17.4bn of bonds this year, GlobalCapital reported. The Ad Hoc Bondholder Group that owned more than half of the sovereign’s bonds even said that the process “set a precedent” for Covid-19 era restructurings. Jan Dehn, head of research at Ashmore, part of the Ad Hoc group, explains that on one hand the group was referring to modifications in collective actions clauses that some creditors hope will become standard practice.

The English High Court appointed Ben Cairns and Richard Fleming of Alvarez & Marsal as joint administrators of NMC Health on 9 April 2020, but NMC Health’s operating subsidiaries in the Middle East, including its 36 UAE-incorporated subsidiaries (the NMC Companies), are not within the jurisdiction of the English courts and are not part of the English administration process, JD Supra reported. On 27 September 2020, however, the Courts of Abu Dhabi Global Market (the ADGM Courts) placed the NMC Companies into administration and appointed Ben Cairns and Richard Fleming as administrators.