Headlines

Swedish group Ericsson has asked India’s top court to send tycoon Anil Ambani to prison, after his troubled Reliance Communications allegedly breached a court order to pay $79m in unpaid dues, the Financial Times reported. RCom, once India’s most valuable telecom company, has been fighting to stave off bankruptcy for more than a year, after suffering a heavy loss of market share. Ericsson had originally claimed Rs11bn ($158m) in unpaid fees for outsourced management services, and launched insolvency proceedings against RCom last year.

As the eurozone official in charge of shutting down failed banks, Elke König is leading a revolution in how Europe handles financial catastrophe, the Financial Times reported. For years a major bank failure in the eurozone seemed an unlikely possibility that could be safely left to national regulators. But the panic that spread through the financial system a decade ago — and the €1.6tn of taxpayer support that EU governments provided to try to quell the turmoil — changed that.

The engineering arm of Monarch Airlines, the holiday carrier that collapsed in 2017, has been put into administration with the immediate loss of 408 jobs, the Financial Times reported. Administrators KPMG were called in after Monarch Aircraft Engineering, the last remnant of Monarch Airlines and which provides aircraft maintenance services and has a training academy, ran into financial difficulties and failed to find a buyer. The engineering business had been bought by Greybull Capital, the private equity group, after the collapse of Monarch.

Vijay Mallya, the Indian tycoon fighting multiple cases in the U.K. after defaulting on bank loans, was declared a "fugitive economic offender" by a special Mumbai court under a new law, television channels reported. Mallya is the first to be declared a fugitive under the new law, which gives authorities greater powers to seize and confiscate assets of economic offenders, according to CNN-News18 and India Today TV, Bloomberg News reported. The ruling comes on the back of Mallya losing a bid last month to avoid extradition to India from the U.K., where he is currently based.

Emerging markets were a boon for bankers after the 2008 crisis, when resource-rich Africa and Asia seemed to have definitively decoupled from the debt-laden economies of the U.S. and Europe. Yet as lawsuits over alleged corruption and bribery pile up, an uglier side of those glory days is emerging — and taxpayers and investors will be left to pick up the tab, a Bloomberg View reported. Credit Suisse Group AG’s dealings in Mozambique, where about half the population lives in poverty, are the latest to be thrust in the spotlight by U.S. prosecutors.

India needs to resume subsidies on imported natural gas to help revive power plants that have been stranded for want of fuel and could turn into bad assets for banks, according to a lawmakers’ report, Bloomberg News reported. The federal government should supply the gas at lower than market rates by utilizing funds from the so-called Power System Development Fund or from the environment tax on coal, the Standing Committee on Energy said in its report on Friday. Imported gas for the plants was subsidized for two years through March 2017.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. still sees an imminent debt restructuring in Lebanon as unlikely but is already turning its attention to how much investors could recover as one of the world’s most indebted countries teeters on the brink of financial crisis, Bloomberg News reported. Under Goldman’s base scenario, foreign investors would recover 35 cents on the dollar, Farouk Soussa, an economist at Goldman Sachs, said in a report. But he said any debt overhaul would put the country’s banks first, meaning “the actual recovery value” would be significantly different to contain damage.

The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal on Thursday asked the Ahmedabad bench of the National Company Law Tribunal to expeditiously decide on the Essar Steel insolvency case, where ArcelorMittal emerged as the highest bidder, BloombergQuint reported. Essar Steel lenders led by the State Bank of India had filed an application with the tribunal seeking early approval of the resolution plan. The case has been running for about 500 days as against a maximum of 270 days allowed for a resolution under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code.

Three former Credit Suisse bankers were charged by US prosecutors alongside Mozambique’s former finance minister over alleged fraud connected to the southern African nation’s $2bn hidden loans scandal, the Financial Times reported. A spokesperson for the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of New York said that three former employees of the Swiss investment bank were arrested in London on Thursday and their extradition was being sought over alleged money laundering and defrauding of US investors in the loans.

Asia is finally succumbing to the global property slowdown that’s jolted homeowners and investors from Vancouver to London, with markets in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia showing fresh signs of softening, Bloomberg News reported. The economic ramifications could be serious. Lower house prices and higher mortgage rates will not only dent consumer confidence, but also disposable incomes, S&P Global Ratings said in a report last month. A simultaneous decline in house prices globally could lead to “financial and macroeconomic instability,” the IMF said in study released in April.