Headlines

United Group, the private-equity backed cable company, has struck a €1.2bn deal to acquire Bulgaria’s former state owned telecoms operator Vivacom, the Financial Times reported. The sale is one of the largest deals struck by United, owned by BC Partners, to consolidate the Balkan media and communications industry. It agreed to buy Tele2 Croatia for €220m in May and has so far rolled up about 100 Balkan businesses. It comes in spite of a long-running ownership dispute around Vivacom, which is still rumbling through the courts.

Brussels has cut its growth forecasts for the eurozone to their lowest level since the height of the bloc’s sovereign debt crisis, warning the slowdown will persist for at least the next two years, the Financial Times reported. The European Commission on Thursday reduced its annual projection for eurozone GDP growth to 1.1 per cent in 2019 — down 0.1 percentage point from its last forecast and marking the lowest annual expansion since 2014.

Bribe allegations leveled in court against a VTB Group executive may complicate the Russian state-owned bank’s attempts to recoup a $535 million loan that’s part of a major debt scandal in Mozambique, Bloomberg News reported. A New York court heard testimony last month that the VTB executive in charge of the deal, Makram Abboud, took $2 million in kickbacks. The bank denies the allegations, made by a former Credit Suisse Group AG banker at a criminal trial in which VTB isn’t a party, and its employee hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing.

TVT Media, a London-headquartered provider of media localization and end-to-end content services, filed for insolvency on October 21, 2019, according to regulatory filings, Slator reported. TVT’s operations in the UK generated revenues of nearly GBP 10m (USD 12.6m) in 2017 (the most recent year for which numbers are available), but the company’s global size is likely a multiple of the figure given that it operates large subsidiaries in the US, the Netherlands, Poland, Australia, Singapore, and Japan.

The government is mulling a special window for resolution of stressed non-banking finance companies under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, a senior government official said, Mint reported. A special window, is certainly something which is being examined closely, the official said. The move also comes against the backdrop of financial sector players like Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd (DHFL) facing troubles. Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank is also grappling with financial woes.

India’s financial crisis has hit ordinary people hard. School teachers and electrical engineers have seen their pension savings get stuck in bonds of defaulted institutions, a Bloomberg View reported. More than a million depositors of a cooperative bank can’t access their cash. Homeowners have spent billions of dollars on apartments that will never be finished. Yet for workers in rich nations, the blowup in India’s shadow-banking and real-estate industries is an opportunity. Will they profit from it or get burned like their Indian counterparts?

Italy has warned that a German proposal to complete the EU’s banking union would harm the competitiveness of the bloc’s banks, in comments heralding complex negotiations over Europe’s most ambitious integration project since the creation of the single currency, the Financial Times reported. Speaking on the margins of a gathering of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels, Roberto Gualtieri took issue with a key part of bank regulation plans laid out by his German counterpart this week in the Financial Times.

A small Chinese lender made a rare decision to skip early redemption on its local tier-two bond, sparking fresh concern on the country’s smaller lenders as non-performing loans rise amid an economic slowdown, Bloomberg News reported. Guangdong Nanyue Bank Co, based in the coastal province in Southeast China, said it won’t exercise an early redemption on its 1.5 billion yuan ($215 million) 6% tier-two bond next month, according to a filing on Thursday on the China Bond website. It didn’t give a reason for its move.

Lebanon’s banks are worried that a central bank deadline for compulsory capital increases is too tight as they grapple with the fallout from weeks of anti-government protests, banking sources familiar with the matter said, Reuters reported. They said it was possible lenders might ask the banking regulator for an extension to the requirement to raise their Common Equity Tier 1 capital, a key measure of financial strength, by 10% through cash injections by the end of the year. The central bank did not respond to a request for comment.

Komercni Banka on Wednesday posted an 8.5% drop in third-quarter net profit, in line with estimates as financial operations income fell and the Czech lender did not see a net release of bad loan provisions as in previous quarters, Reuters reported. Attributable net profit came in at 3.85 billion crowns ($167.25 million), versus the average estimate of 3.88 billion in a Reuters poll. The bank, 60% owned by France’s Societe Generale, boosted net interest income and net fees by 2.1% and 1.2% year-on-year respectively.