Headlines

Malaysian officials believe China has been harboring one of the world’s most-wanted financial fugitives, the financier the U.S. Justice Department alleges is at the center of the $4.5 billion theft from a Malaysian development fund, The Wall Street Journal reported. Singapore confirmed this summer that it has been pursuing 36-year-old Jho Low via an Interpol Red Notice for the past two years. Malaysia has been trying to arrest him since June. But through June and into July, Mr. Low had been living freely in China, a person aware of his travels said.

Dubai’s financial services regulator has stopped Abraaj Capital from taking on new business or moving money to Abraaj Investment Management (AIML), its related entity, as part of an investigation into the group, Reuters reported. “Given the onset of financial difficulties of the wider Abraaj Group, the DFSA has been closely monitoring the activities of its regulated entity ACL,” Dubai Financial Services Authority said in a statement on Thursday.

As former cricket star Imran Khan prepares to take his oath as Pakistan’s new prime minister Saturday, there’s one thing he must be clear about: Pakistan may be China’s friend at the moment, but the relationship could quickly turn sour. In the next month or so, Islamabad may have to take another bailout package from the International Monetary Fund — the country’s 13th, a Bloomberg View reported. The State Bank of Pakistan now holds just over $10 billion in foreign exchange reserves, giving enough room to buy only two months’ worth of imports. But the IMF route is tedious.

PwC should have flagged significant doubts over the future of BHS in an audit that was completed just days before the now collapsed British retailer was sold for a token one pound in 2015, a regulator said on Wednesday. BHS, which was sold in 2015 by billionaire retailer Philip Green’s Taveta Group, had 163 stores and 11,000 staff when it collapsed a year later, triggering a political firestorm, Reuters reported. The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) watchdog in June fined PwC a record 6.5 million pounds ($8.3 million) and former partner Stephen Denison 325,000 pounds.

Arnaud Vagner has been a mystery for more than three years. Noble Group, once one of the world’s biggest commodity trading houses, characterized him as a disgruntled former junior employee behind a series of reports by Iceberg Research, an anonymous group that began attacking its accounting practices in 2015, Bloomberg News reported. Even as the combined value of Noble’s equity and debt plunged by about $10 billion since then, Vagner declined to comment publicly or even confirm he was behind Iceberg. With the company now on the brink of a restructuring, he’s ready to talk.

It’s pay day for $1.125 billion of Venezuelan sovereign bonds. But no one is expecting to get any money. After all, the bond in question is already in default due to a missed interest payment back in February, Bloomberg News reported. Why would Nicolas Maduro’s government fork over hundreds of millions of dollars it can’t afford to part with when the nation and its flagship oil company are already about $5 billion in the hole with creditors? The one new thing today is that this missed payment will mark the first default on government bond principal, rather than just interest payments.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has found a benefactor to help pull Turkey from the brink of a financial crisis as Qatar promised to invest $15 billion in the country, Bloomberg News reported. The lira extended gains to 6 percent after Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Bin Al Thani made the pledge after a 3-1/2-hour meeting with Erdogan in Ankara on Wednesday. It follows a string of urgent steps Erdogan has taken to protect its economy from an escalating feud with U.S. counterpart Donald Trump over an American pastor held in Turkey.

Struggling to staunch a run on the peso that has helped drive the economy to the brink of recession, Argentina is aggressively pushing investors out of some of the local debt notes they hold, Bloomberg News reported. It is a risky gambit -- the opposite of the kind of measure a country would typically take at a moment of great financial duress.

Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications is in discussions with TPG, Blackstone and other bidders over the sale of its remaining telecommunications assets in a deal that would mark the tycoon’s formal exit from India’s telecommunications sector, the Financial Times reported. According to people involved in the talks, the sale of RCom’s international submarine cable network, fixed-line telecoms network and data centres has attracted bids from I Squared Capital and a consortium comprising TPG, Blackstone and Varde.

A Chinese local-government investment platform that defaulted on a Rmb500m bond payment on Monday has belatedly repaid the debt, according to local media, the Financial Times reported. China Business News, a respected Chinese newspaper, cited unnamed sources to report that Sixth Agriculture State-Owned Assets Management Co had already transferred the full amount due for principal and interest on the bond to Shanghai Clearing House, one of two main state-owned clearing house and custodians for China’s interbank bond market.