Headlines

Kenya’s East African Cables and its parent firm TransCentury Ltd have completed a debt restructuring deal that has reduced the group’s debt by almost half, they said on Monday, Reuters reported. TransCentury, which was founded by a group of Kenyan investors in 1997, invested in a range of infrastructure companies, including East African Cables but has struggled with a heavy debt burden, losses and a plunge in its share price.

India’s Dewan Housing Finance Corp Ltd (DHFL) filed its long-delayed audited results for the quarter ended March 31 late on Monday, and revealed that its auditors had raised several red flags around its numbers, raising fresh concerns about the future of the troubled lender, Reuters reported. DHFL, one of India’s biggest housing finance companies with almost 1 trillion rupees ($14.52 billion) in debt, has been hard hit by a liquidity crunch that has crippled several Indian non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) following last year’s collapse of infrastructure lender IL&FS.

Whoever wins the U.K.’s leadership race, investors reckon its markets will lose. That’s because for years only one thing has mattered to money managers focused on Great Britain -- the risk of a messy divorce from the European Union pummeling the nation’s assets and darkening its economic prospects, Bloomberg News reported. It’s a scenario neither frontrunner Boris Johnson nor his adversary Jeremy Hunt may be able to avert. “Markets will remain fixated on the Brexit process above all else,” said Edward Park, deputy CIO at Brooks Macdonald Asset Management. “U.K.

A decade after the international financial crisis and local political upheavals, many of the non-oil exporting nations in the Middle East and North Africa are undergoing a process of redefinition of how they are linked with the global economy. It is not going well, a Bloomberg View reported. Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan are becoming more dependent on external borrowing than on foreign direct investments compared to the pre-2008 period. This is visible with declining ratios of FDIs to GDP, in contrast with increasing ratios of foreign debt to GDP and total exports.

Troubled property development schemes spearheaded by a financially stretched former football club chairman account for almost a fifth of the money owed to investors in collapsed peer-to-peer lending platform Lendy, the Financial Times reported. The P2P platform, which had offered retail investors a 12 per cent return before it failed in May, extended £27m of loans to companies controlled by Stewart Day, the former chairman of Bury Football Club, that have since gone into administration, according to Companies House filings.

As top Wall Street banks warn of zero Treasury yields and falling income from lending, their European peers have been dealing with negative rates for half a decade, with an end looking increasingly far off, Bloomberg News reported. The drought has left them without a cushion to fall back on when income from trading dries up, as it did in the first half, and it’s one reason why once-mighty Deutsche Bank AG just announced the most radical cuts yet to its investment bank.

China’s bond market has been eerily quiet lately. Over the past year, investors in China’s U.S. dollar bonds had gotten used to the idea of defaults, a Bloomberg View reported. As early as 2015, the government started allowing some state-owned enterprises to renege on their commitments, a painful but welcome step that helps differentiate healthy firms and troubled ones. But there hadn’t been a single case since China Minsheng Investment Group Corp. triggered a cross-default in April.

India’s top court temporarily put ArcelorMittal’s $6.1 billion purchase of Essar Steel India Ltd. on hold, after the mill’s lenders sought to annul a lower court ruling that split sale proceeds proportionately among all creditors, Bloomberg News reported. The Supreme Court on Monday admitted financial lenders’ appeal against a bankruptcy court ruling that put secured creditors like banks at par with operational creditors, or suppliers to the plants. It also said it would resolve issues arising from the Essar verdict expeditiously and fix an early date for hearing the case.

A Chinese company has pulled out of the running to buy British Steel, dealing a blow to efforts to rescue the stricken manufacturer and safeguard thousands of jobs, the Financial Times reported. Jingye Group had submitted an offer for the whole of the UK’s second-largest steelmaker, which collapsed into insolvency two months ago after its request for a £30m state bailout was rejected, according to two people briefed on the matter. Based in China’s industrial heartland of Hebei province, Jingye also owns hotels and a medicines business alongside its main steelmaking operations.

State-run Union Bank of India has tagged Suzlon Energy Ltd as a bad loan and more banks are expected to follow suit as the stressed wind turbine maker has struggled to repay its lenders, two people aware of the development said, Mint reported. In the quarter ended 30 June, Union Bank has updated the status of the account as non-performing in the central bank’s Central Repository of Information on Large Credits database, said one of the two people cited above.