Headlines

Scandinavian airline SAS said yesterday that a U.S. Bankruptcy Court had approved its chapter 11 reorganization plan, Reuters reported. Bankruptcy Judge Michael Wiles approved SAS AB’s bankruptcy restructuring at a court hearing in Manhattan, clearing the airline to move ahead with a restructuring that includes a $1.2 billion investment from a consortium of bidders, including the Danish government. The deal will provide up to $325 million in value to the airline’s junior creditors through a combination of cash and equity in the reorganized company.

Canada saw a steep rise in insolvencies in 2023, particularly in Q4 and in Ontario and Quebec, and small businesses bore much of the brunt, according to a report from Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, CanadianLawyerMag.com reported. Rising by 41.4 percent compared to 2020 and 30.7 percent higher than 2019, the firm said its analysis of business openings, closings, and repayment requirements of government-subsidized loans indicated that smaller businesses largely drove rising filing rates.

An appeals court in Montenegro on Wednesday confirmed that a South Korean mogul known as “the cryptocurrency king” will be handed over to his native country, the Associated Press reported. Both South Korea and the U.S. had requested Do Kwon’s extradition from Montenegro. A Montenegrin court initially decided he should be handed over to the U.S. but that ruling was later overturned in favor of South Korea. The Appeals Court of Montenegro approved an earlier ruling by the High Court to extradite Kwon to South Korea rather than the United States, a statement said.

U.K. inflation fell more sharply than expected to the lowest level in 2 1/2 years, bolstering investor expectations that the Bank of England will be able to reduce borrowing costs in the coming months, Bloomberg News reported. The Consumer Prices Index rose 3.4% in February from a year earlier, compared with 4% pace the month before, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday. The figure was lower than the median of 3.5% predicted by economists and the BOE, although it was in line with the Bloomberg Economics’s forecast.

SBB, the landlord at the center of Sweden’s property crisis, saw its credit rating cut two notches by Fitch Ratings and may face another cut to “selective default” by S&P Global Ratings, Bloomberg News reported. Fitch downgraded the senior unsecured debt rating of Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget i Norden AB, as it is otherwise known, to CCC+ from B due to increased property disposals and tight liquidity, the credit evaluator said in a statement on Tuesday. S&P placed the company on watch for a possible downgrade to selective default, according to a separate statement.

China Life Insurance Co. is in crunch talks with lenders to an office tower in Canary Wharf to help stave off the locality’s third potential major default, as the eastern financial district of London grapples with some of the city’s highest vacancy rates, Bloomberg News reported. The landlord is in discussions with Lloyds Banking Group Plc, which originally financed 10 Upper Bank Street before syndicating the vast majority of the debt to several Chinese banks, about a plan to avoid an event of default ahead of the loan’s maturity next month, people with knowledge of the negotiations said.

Real estate companies undergoing the so-called reverse insolvency are facing bridge funding challenges due to lack of clarity on the applicability of rules, according to a recent commentary in MoneyControl.com. Under the normal insolvency route, any creditor who provides bridge funding gets super priority in terms of dues. However under reverse insolvency, there is no clarity on how such funding will be treated. Hence, potential creditors are reluctant to infuse bridge capital, say legal experts. Generally, bridge capital is considered senior to other existing debts in an insolvency case.

The Czech Republic's central bank on Wednesday cut its key interest rate for a third straight time amid falling inflation and an effort to help the economy, the Associated Press reported. The cut by a half-percentage point brought the interest rate down to 5.75%. The move was expected by most analysts. The bank started to trim borrowing costs by a quarter-point on Dec. 21, which marked the first cut since June 22, 2022. It continued with a cut by a half-percentage point on Feb 8.

A group of Zambia's international bondholders has signed a non-disclosure agreement with the government to discuss a $3 billion debt restructuring proposal, three sources familiar with situation said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The government sent a formal debt rework proposal to the steering committee of the creditor group last week, two of the sources said. Entering into a non-disclosure agreement usually marks the start of formal restructuring talks.

Raiffeisen Bank International AG’s protracted efforts to exit Russia faced fresh doubts on Wednesday, sending shares of the lender lower and forcing it to postpone a bond sale, Bloomberg News reported. US authorities are pushing the Austrian bank to drop a plan that would have allowed it to repatriate as much as €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) stuck in Russia, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the discussions. Shares of the lender slumped as much as 16%, prompting it to delay the planned sale of debt securities.