Headlines

The UK arm of the Belgian-owned bakery chain Le Pain Quotidien is at risk of falling into administration within days, putting 500 jobs under threat unless a buyer is found this week, the Financial Times reported. The restructuring experts Alvarez & Marsal are running an emergency sale of the 26-site café business with the deadline for bids on Wednesday, according to people with knowledge of the process. If no buyer is found during the sale process, known as Project Sunburst according to one person, administrators will be appointed.

China’s painful economic shutdown was expected to have put the world’s second-largest bond market on course for a third straight record year of defaults. But it’s not panning out that way, Bloomberg News reported. The 30.4 billion yuan ($4.3 billion) worth of debt that’s gone sour so far this year in the $4.5 trillion onshore corporate bond market marks a sharp 21% drop from the pace in 2019, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

A push by some euro area officials to free lenders of their bad debts faces resistance from countries worried that they will bear the costs, according to people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg News reported. In northern Europe, where bad loan levels are far lower than in the south, governments and regulators led by Germany don’t yet see the need for the so-called bad bank that officials elsewhere are proposing, the people said, asking to remain anonymous because the discussions are private. The idea also raises legal questions, they said.

Norwegian Air on Monday reported that four Swedish and Danish subsidiaries had filed for bankruptcy and that it had ended staffing contracts in Europe and the United States, putting some 4,700 jobs at risk, Reuters reported. The airline is seeking to convert debt to equity, money from shareholders and Norwegian state guarantees in a bid to survive the coronavirus crisis.

Argentina’s biggest bondholders have rejected the government’s offer to restructure $83bn of foreign debt, raising the prospect that the country is headed for its ninth sovereign debt default, the Financial Times reported. In statements released on Monday, three creditor groups rebuffed the terms laid out by the government late last week, which called for interest payments to be delayed until 2023 and principal payments until 2026. The deal encompassed not only debt issued by the country since 2016, but also previously restructured bonds issued in 2005 and 2010.

The number of British companies ceasing trading jumped in March in a potential early sign of the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the country’s economy, according to academic research published on Monday, Reuters reported. Analysis from the Enterprise Research Centre - led by staff at the University of Warwick and Aston University in central England - showed a 70% jump in company dissolutions to just over 21,000 in March 2020 compared with the same month a year before. Compared with February, the increase was just over 19%.

The number of companies filing for protection under Colombia’s insolvency law could nearly double in the coming months because of fall-out from its coronavirus lockdown, the head of the country’s companies regulator said, Reuters reported. The Superintendency of Companies has modified insolvency rules, which allow debtors to renegotiate their obligations with creditors so they can continue operating and avoid bankruptcy.

Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd said on Tuesday it has entered voluntary administration to recapitalize the business and emerge in a stronger financial position after being battered by the coronavirus crisis and a high debt load, Reuters reported. Deloitte has been appointed as the administrator, Virgin said in a statement, after the airline was unable to secure a A$1.4 billion ($887.60 million) loan from the federal government.

Bankers are increasingly reluctant to give commodity traders in Asia the credit they need to survive as the lenders grow ever more fearful about the risk of a catastrophic default, Bloomberg News reported. Their anxiety has reached new heights in recent days as fabled Singapore oil trader Hin Leong Trading (Pte.) Ltd. struggles to repay debts said to amount to almost $4 billion. And that’s just weeks after another commodities firm in the city-state, Agritrade International Pte, collapsed after a unit defaulted on its loans.

India’s central bank announced new measures to encourage lending to the country’s cash-starved borrowers by injecting $6.5 billion into the banking system, ordering lenders to freeze dividends and easing rules on bad loans, Bloomberg News reported. In another effort to strengthen the financial system’s response to the coronavirus-fueled slowdown, Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das said the central bank will provide 500 billion rupees ($6.5 billion) in a new round of Targeted Long-Term Repo Operations.