Headlines

International lessors have grounded more Jet Airways planes prior to potentially moving them out of India, as scepticism builds whether a state-led bailout of the carrier can clear their dues on time, sources familiar with the matter said, Reuters reported. The troubles at India’s Jet, which is saddled with a billion dollars in debt, have rekindled memories of Kingfisher Airlines’ collapse in 2012 that forced lessors to write off millions of dollars. Jet has defaulted on loans and has not paid pilots, leasing firms and suppliers for months.

Europe’s largest telecoms companies have issued mixed guidance for the coming financial year, warning of slower growth due to competition and continued uncertainty. Deutsche Telekom, the continent’s largest telecoms group by value, has been hit by questions over whether regulators will approve its plan to acquire US rival Sprint this year, as well as the impact of an impending spectrum auction.

Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s holding company, LetterOne, has stepped up its criticism of a turnround plan at Spanish grocer Dia Group as it filed regulatory documents for its own bid to buy out and fix the troubled chain, the Financial Times reported. “A lot of Dia’s problems have been in the making for some time,” said Stephan DuCharme, managing partner of LetterOne division L1 Retail.

Ecuador’s benchmark bonds soared to a six-month high after President Lenin Moreno’s government secured a $4.2 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg News reported. The aid is intended to support the OPEC nation over the next three years as it tries to curb spending and revive sluggish growth. Including the IMF package, Ecuador is set to receive more than $10 billion in loans from multilateral lenders, Moreno said Wednesday in a televised address to the nation. “Thanks to the firm decisions I have made, we are not what today is Venezuela,” Moreno said.

German manufacturing activity dropped to its lowest level since 2012 in February according to a closely-watched survey, but the country’s services sector remained resilient, the Financial Times reported. The purchasing managers' index for the manufacturing sector dropped to 47.6 in February, the lowest level since December 2012 and well below the expectations of analysts polled by Reuters for 49.7. A reading below 50 indicates that a sector is in contraction.

Scandinavians are taking a hard look at their institutions as allegations of systematic money laundering rock the entire region, Bloomberg News reported. With Swedbank AB becoming the latest lender to get dragged into a dirty money scandal that’s already engulfed Danske Bank A/S, those at the top of Sweden’s financial establishment are speaking out. Hans Lindblad, the director general of the Swedish National Debt Office, says the financial industry now risks losing the trust of the people. He says the consequences of that would be dire for the whole economy.

South Africa’s state-owned power utility may need as much as 230 billion rand ($16.5 billion) of financial assistance over the next decade, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni said, Bloomberg News reported. Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. needs immediate help and it can’t await restructuring of its business, Mboweni told lawmakers in Cape Town Thursday. “It is 150 billion rand amortized and that makes it 230 billion rand, or 23 billion rand a year,” National Treasury Director-General Dondo Mogajane said.

South Africa will bail out state utility Eskom with 69 billion rand ($4.9 billion) over three years, the centrepiece of a budget that exposed the limited room President Cyril Ramaphosa has to fix the economy ahead of an election in May, Reuters reported. Ramaphosa, who is fighting rifts within his own party before the parliamentary election, has made reforming Eskom one of his top priorities as its 420 billion rand debt pile poses a direct threat to Africa’s most developed economy.

Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht SA next week will ask its bondholders to accept losses of more than 70 percent from their bonds’ face value as part of a restructuring, two sources with knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday. Around $3 billion in outstanding Odebrecht Finance Ltd bonds will be affected, the sources added, asking for anonymity to disclose private plans, Reuters reported. The exact size of the haircut is still undefined, but the person said it could be between 70 percent and 80 percent of the bonds’ value.

What do Germany, Malta and the Netherlands have in common? They’re the only three eurozone countries that have lower debt burdens than they did in 2008, according to a new Moody’s report, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. This might be something of a surprising result, coming a few years after a sovereign debt crisis in which it became clear that market appetite for these assets could suddenly evaporate, throwing the entire basis of the modern bond-financed-society into question.