Headlines

Twelve people were arrested in Croatia on Tuesday on suspicion of causing over one billion kuna ($152.16 million) in financial damage to the country’s biggest shipbuilding group Uljanik and the state budget, the interior minister said. Uljanik, which is 25 percent state-owned and operates two shipyards in the northern Adriatic cities of Pula and Rijeka, has been battling to stave off bankruptcy due to liquidity problems that began in 2017, Reuters reported. Workers are currently on strike, seeking unpaid wages.

Banks risk derailing a rescue deal for Europe’s largest zinc producer Nyrstar, threatening thousands of jobs in the process if the company is forced into liquidation, the Financial Times reported. Lenders to the Belgian-registered company are currently unwilling to take a loss on metal-for-loan deals as part of a restructuring deal that has been agreed by Nyrstar bondholders and Trafigura, its largest shareholder, according to people familiar with the matter.

Euro-area banks will know by June how generous the terms of the European Central Bank’s new loans are going to be, according to Governing Council member Olli Rehn. Policy makers have yet to pass judgment on the severity of the current slowdown that prompted that measure, the Finnish central bank governor told Bloomberg in an interview. They are determined to keep lending conditions favorable with record-low interest rates and the new round of long-term funding announced earlier this month, Bloomberg News reported.

Confidence in South Africa’s civil construction sector is at the lowest in at least 22 years and could stay there for some time, Bloomberg News reported. A gauge tracking sentiment in the sector dropped in the first quarter to the lowest since its inception in 1997, according to a statement Tuesday by FirstRand Group Ltd.’s First National Bank and the Stellenbosch-based Bureau for Economic Research. That means 90 percent of participants in the quarterly survey are unsatisfied with current business conditions.

Household debt in Canada, a nation generally known for moderation, has reached levels that could be qualified as excessive, Bloomberg News reported. Canadians owe C$2.16 trillion—which, as a share of gross domestic product, is the highest debt load in the Group of Seven economies. With the housing market cooling, a reckoning may be fast approaching.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. may get its cheapest dollar-denominated syndicated loan ever as it negotiates with banks to amend terms of its existing $4 billion borrowing, Bloomberg News reported. The Chinese Internet giant wants to cut the interest margin of the facility that it signed in May 2016 by 25 basis points to 85 basis points over Libor, said people familiar with the matter. That would be the cheapest rate ever for Alibaba, Bloomberg-compiled data show. It’s also the lowest margin among outstanding loans of local peers Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc, according to the data.

Emotions are running high among some Hyflux Ltd. retail investors who stand to lose almost everything in the collapse of Singapore’s once much vaunted water-treatment company, Bloomberg News reported. The frustration has prompted some of them to organize a protest on March 30 over a steep haircut imposed by the company under its S$2.8 billion ($2.1 billion) debt restructuring plan. The Business Times published a letter from a reader calling on Singapore to nationalize the plant, saying Hyflux may be worth as much as a commodity trader that got government support in 2014.

Debenhams Plc once again brushed off billionaire Mike Ashley, who holds almost a third of the ailing department-store operator, saying a proposal to buy the company wouldn’t solve its funding problems, Bloomberg News reported. Ashley’s Sports Direct International Plc said late Monday that it may make a cash offer to buy all the Debenhams shares it doesn’t currently own, as well as new stock.

Brazilian carrier Avianca Brasil will reduce its fleet size and cease operations at Rio de Janeiro’s international airport as it downsizes in the wake of a bankruptcy filing in December, the firm said on Tuesday. The company said in a statement it would seek to reduce the number of destinations it serves to 23 and cut its fleet size to 26 planes over the month of April, Reuters reported. It will also cease operations in the cities of Belem and Petrolina, as well as at Rio de Janeiro-Galeao International Airport.

The idea behind merging two of Europe’s weakest financial institutions—Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank—is that together, they can somehow lean on each other and steady their fortunes. Formal talks are continuing and there is no guarantee a deal will happen. But a look at the numbers shows both the urgency and the difficulty of the task, The Wall Street Journal reported. Germany’s banking market is fragmented. At nearly 1,600, the country has more banks than the U.K., France, Italy and Spain combined.