Headlines

Financial creditors to Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd. have submitted claims worth Rs 86,892 crore against the mortgage lender taken to insolvency courts by the central bank, Bloomberg Quint reported. R Subramaniah Kumar, the administrator appointed by the Reserve Bank of India, has so far admitted claims worth nearly Rs 80,980 crore before the insolvency proceedings begin, according to information available on the DHFL website. Mutual funds and other bondholders have claimed Rs 45,550 crore. The administrator admitted most of these claims.

A Russian court in the city of Tyumen has declared the bankruptcy of Russia’s Antipinsky refinery, Interfax news agency reported on Monday, Reuters reported. The refinery, which has a capacity of 9 million tonnes per year, filed for bankruptcy in May after halting operations on several occasions due to a lack of funds to pay for crude oil deliveries. Read more

A group of international investors managing trillions of dollars in assets has filed what it says is the first in a series of lawsuits against Danske Bank in connection with a money laundering scandal engulfing Denmark’s largest lender, the Irish Times reported. The writ, which was filed on Friday in the district Court of Copenhagen by law firm Nemeth Sigetty Advokatpartnerselskab, is for about 1.5 billion kroner (€197m), according to a statement.

Financial services have been too slow to cut investment in fossil fuels, a delay that could lead to a sharp increase in global temperatures, Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned, the Irish Times reported. Mr Carney, due to become the United Nations’ special envoy for climate change next year when he steps down from the bank, told BBC radio that global warming could render the assets of many financial companies worthless.

Embattled water treatment firm Hyflux's TuasOne waste-to-energy facility is expected to be operational in January 2021, said the National Environment Agency (NEA), The Straits Times reported. The agency said it has been monitoring discussions among the stakeholders of the TuasOne project and "is supportive of the stakeholders' actions taken to complete the project expeditiously". Hyflux said in a bourse filing yesterday that the new agreement to ensure continued funding for the TuasOne waste-to-energy project will have an "overall material adverse impact" on Hyflux's financial performance.

Thailand is set to end 2019 at the weakest pace of growth in five years and little to cheer about next year, as South-east Asia’s second-largest economy faces headwinds from global trade tensions, a surging baht and rising political risks, Malay Mail reported. The export-reliant country has been sharply hit by the Sino-US trade conflict. Exports may fall 3.3 per cent in 2019 before rising just 0.5 per cent in 2020, according to the Bank of Thailand (BOT).

German cabin-crew union UFO called for more strikes at Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s low-cost Germanwings unit after the two sides failed to settle a long-running dispute, the Irish Times reported. Workers at Germanwings, which now operates under the Eurowings umbrella, will strike between December 30th and January 1st, the union said. Further strike action will be announced after January 2nd, 2020. The Germanwings brand was folded into Lufthansa’s Eurowings group after a deadly 2015 crash. Passengers are only able to book through the Eurowings brand.

For many Indian tycoons, 2019 turned woeful as lenders -- empowered by the nation’s recent bankruptcy law and desperate to clean up soured debt from their books -- started seizing assets of delinquent firms or dragged them into insolvency, Bloomberg Quint reported. Indian banks wrote off a record $39 billion of loans in the 18 months through September in a bid to repair their balance sheets as they battled the world’s worst bad debt pile.

Indian carriers are likely to end this fiscal year through March with huge losses, hampered by their ability to raise fares even during the traditionally strong October-December quarter because of cut-throat competition, said three airline officials, requesting anonymity, Livemint reported. The collapse of Jet Airways (India) Ltd in April because of a severe cash crunch and a large debt pile has failed to lift industry fares as other airlines jumped to add capacity.

Deutsche Telekom has reached an agreement with its works council on restructuring its troubled T-Systems IT services division, a company spokesman said on Friday, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The spokesman confirmed an earlier report in Handelsblatt that said the agreement included moving large parts of the business to a newly created German subsidiary and affected more than 2,000 staff.