Headlines

China’s HNA Group is in talks with banks to find a buyer for its CWT logistics firm just nine months after acquiring the Singaporean company in a $1 billion deal, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The sale, if completed, would be the latest in a series of divestments aimed at slashing debt at the aviation-to-financial services conglomerate that is restructuring its far-flung operations, Reuters reported.

More than 30 highly-leveraged Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have drawn up new plans to cut debt, the official China Securities Journal reported on Wednesday, part of a plan to cut debt ratios in the state sector by 2 percentage points by 2020, Reuters reported. China is in the middle of an ambitious corporate restructuring programme aimed at reducing debts and improving the performance of its huge but lumbering state-owned sector.

South Korea’s central bank warned on Thursday that household debt was growing much faster than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average as large mortgages and high rents drive up indebtedness, Reuters reported. “Since the end of the global financial crisis, South Korea’s household debt growth has significantly exceeded that of the OECD, and the trend will continue,” the Bank of Korea (BOK) said in a financial stability report.

Denmark’s status as one of the world’s least corrupt nations is being challenged by allegations that its biggest bank, Danske Bank A/S, was a central pipeline for channeling billions in illegal funds across Europe from Russia, Moldova and Azerbaijan, Bloomberg News reported. An internal bank report is expected on Sept. 19 to detail just what happened. The biggest money-laundering scandal in modern Danish history won’t end there.

Europe’s most senior bankers pleaded in concert with the European Union to speed up its banking and capital markets union projects, warning that the region risks falling further behind the U.S. and China in the global economy, Bloomberg News reported. “If you really want to have a competitive edge” versus the Americas and Asia, “we must complete the banking union,” Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing said Tuesday at the Bloomberg European Capital Markets Forum in Milan.

Toshiba has entered talks with Canadian asset manager Brookfield over the potential sale of its UK nuclear unit NuGen, which was slated to build the Moorside nuclear plant in Cumbria. The talks, which are at an early stage according to two people directly familiar with the matter, come after Toshiba’s negotiations with Korea’s state-owned Korean Electric Power Corp have dragged on, with an exclusivity period ending in July, the Financial Times reported.

The UK Pension Regulator is facing criticism over a 2013 deal that allowed Kodak UK to jettison it pension liabilities but now looks set to create a £600m hit to the country’s pensions bailout fund, the Financial Times reported. Kodak had sought approval from the regulator to be released from its duty to support its 15,000 member retirement plan, following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak, its US parent company, in 2012.

Unemployment in the UK now stands at its lowest level in four decades. Gross domestic product growth at the start of the third quarter of 2018 also shows an economy in decent shape, having grown faster than in the prior two quarters. But we should not be complacent about those numbers. The UK faces the highest risk of recession of any of the 13 economies for which The Conference Board tracks business cycles and our leading economic index suggests the British economy may start shrinking over the course of the next year, the Financial Times reported in a commentary.

Britain will support Zimbabwe to get on to an interim IMF staff program to help the country quickly clear its foreign arrears, Britain's ambassador in Harare said on Tuesday. Clearing the $1.8 billion in arrears to the World Bank and African Development Bank is seen as a major step for Zimbabwe to start accessing foreign credit, especially for the private sector as well as foreign direct investment, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Italian prosecutors said on Tuesday the far-right League can repay some 45 million euros ($53 million) it owes the state over the next 75 years, saving the governing party from possible bankruptcy, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. A court ruled this month that prosecutors in the northern city of Genoa could seize some 49 million euros from accounts and businesses belonging to the party following a fraud investigation.