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Italy’s UniCredit SpA has sued Hin Leong Trading Pte Ltd over a letter of credit, court documents show, one of several the Singapore oil trader sought from lenders for oil purchases but used to pay debt instead, Reuters reported. The Singapore High Court documents seen by Reuters show the Italian bank has also sued commodity trading giant Glencore over the matter. A source familiar with the case confirmed the lawsuits had been filed.
In a related story, the Financial Times reported that German police raided the headquarters of state-owned lender KfW this month as part of a criminal investigation into employees who approved an unsecured €100m loan to the collapsed payments group Wirecard. A spokesperson for KfW confirmed the raid, which happened two weeks ago, and said that the bank was co-operating with the investigation by Frankfurt prosecutors. Wirecard’s own headquarters on the outskirts of Munich were raided by police on Tuesday as part of the same investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.
EY was warned in 2016 by one of its own employees that senior managers at Wirecard may have committed fraud and one had attempted to bribe an auditor, The Irish Times reported. The revelation that an EY employee identified suspicious activity at Wirecard four years before the payments group imploded in Germany’s largest postwar corporate fraud will increase the pressure on the accounting firm, which audited Wirecard for more than a decade and provided unqualified audits until 2018.
The two companies building the stalled Etlik mega hospital in Ankara agreed to one of Turkey’s largest loan restructurings earlier this month, according to two sources, one of whom said the deal was was worth 1.1 billion euros ($1.3 billion), Reuters reported. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which has invested some 650 million euros in big city hospitals in Turkey in recent years, confirmed it signed off on the deal that should allow construction of Etlik to resume.
Kuwait’s parliament passed a long-awaited insolvency law on Tuesday to help attract investment and commerce, Bloomberg Law reported. The absence of insolvency protection has been cited as a significant deterrent to foreign investment. The new law restructures the legal framework for bankruptcy to focus on rehabilitating troubled companies rather than liquidation.
In early September, six of Lebanon’s top bankers touched down in Paris. It was not a business visit — Lebanese lenders have been shunned by overseas counterparts since the state defaulted in March, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. Representing Lebanon’s powerful banking lobby, the financiers had gone to plead their case to some new sheriffs: French officials. French President Emmanuel Macron is corralling the international community’s efforts to help crisis-stricken Lebanon, while pressuring its unpopular leaders.
Zambia hopes to reach a debt restructuring agreement with creditors by April and hopes to get nearly $1 billion of debt service relief from its requests to official and commercial creditors, Finance Minister Bwalya Ng’andu said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. One of the world’s largest copper producers, Zambia had been wrestling with growing public debt even before the coronavirus outbreak forced lockdowns around the world and cut demand for raw materials.
As China’s largest property developer, Evergrande has never been short on figures to stir awe — and alarm. The company’s land reserves, built during a breakneck expansion as China urbanised, are vast enough to house roughly 10m people. But it is the $123bn in debt Evergrande amassed along the way that has led to wild trading in its shares and bonds over the past week, the Financial Times reported.
IWG is preparing to set Regus into insolvency if landlords do not lower their rents. Like many other shared office operators, IWG takes out long-term leases then sublets them to companies on short-term leases, Allwork.Space reported. The company also operates through several smaller subsidiaries that are responsible for their leases, which gives IWG the ability to place them into administration to walk away from their lease commitments.