Headlines

Struggling to find well-paid work after arriving in Shanghai as a graduate from a middle-ranked Chinese university, Tom Wang turned to another source to fund his spending: credit cards. “Using credit cards did not feel like spending money, and the debt grew and grew,” said the 26-year-old, whose starting salary of Rmb3,000 ($470) a month could not cover rent and the consumption habits he called “irrational”, such as buying the latest smartphone, the Financial Times reported.

The Italian Treasury has bought back nearly €1bn of short-dated government debt in a previously unannounced operation that appeared to be a bid to provide investors with liquidity in the teeth of a sharp market sell-off, the Financial Times reported. The move is the third time the government has bought back its debt since Italian bonds were first hit by negative investor sentiment in late May. That sell-off was triggered by the formation of a populist Eurosceptic coalition government.

Spain’s services industry faced a “marked slowdown” in activity growth last month, bringing a key gauge to its lowest level in almost five years, according to a survey of executives released on Friday, the Financial Times reported. IHS Markit’s Spain services PMI dropped to 52.6 in July from 55.4 in June. It was substantially worse than the fall to 54.4 that economists polled by Reuters had forecast. Output in the services industry expanded at the slowest rate since 2013, IHS Markit said, while growth in new orders eased.

Oi SA, Brazil’s largest fixed line telecom firm, called a general shareholders’ meeting on Sept. 3 in Rio de Janeiro to formally vote on a 4 billion reais ($1.07 billion) capital injection, the company said, Reuters reported. In a securities filing made late on Wednesday night, the firm said shareholders would also consider the composition of a new board of directors and a number of by-law changes, confirming a Reuters report earlier in the day which said Oi would send the invite for the meeting as early as this week.

Billionaire Philip Day is in the early stages of a potential bid for British retailer House of Fraser to save it from collapse, Sky News reported on Thursday citing sources. The news comes a day after a rescue deal for House of Fraser was thrown into doubt after C.banner canceled planned fundraising for its deal to become a majority shareholder in the department store, Reuters reported. Day could yet decide not to table a formal proposal to acquire House of Fraser depending upon due diligence and discussions with the company, Sky News said citing one source.

Buyout firms TPG and KKR & Co have emerged as leading contenders to run Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj’s troubled $1 billion healthcare fund, three sources familiar with the matter said, Reuters reported. The two firms have access to the healthcare fund’s virtual data room and are about to start due diligence, with offers expected in the next few weeks, two of the three sources said.

In a related story, Bloomberg News reported that investors in a $1.6 billion-Abraaj Group fund have hired advisory firm Alvarez & Marsal Holdings LLC to help recover money owed by the floundering Middle Eastern private equity firm, people with knowledge of the matter said. The New York-based company will represent Abraaj Private Equity Fund IV’s backers in talks with liquidators as they seek to recover more than $99 million owed by the Dubai-based buyout firm, said the people, asking not to be identified because the information is confidential.

Estate agents aren’t popular at the best of times, but Countrywide Plc, one of Britain’s biggest residential agents, really takes the biscuit. The massively discounted rights issue it announced Thursday will increase the share count by almost six times, a Bloomberg View reported. To nobody’s surprise, the stock plunged almost two-thirds, bringing the decline so far this year to about 85 percent. The share sale is fully underwritten and will raise about 129 million pounds ($169 million) net of fees — a bit more than the market value the previous day.

Shares in French telecoms group Altice fell 13 per cent in early trade on Thursday, after it reported a fall in sales and warned that margins would be squeezed for the full year as it spent more to win customers. In the second quarter of the year total revenue fell 5 per cent to €3.5bn compared to the same period last year, which included a 6 per cent fall in its telecoms division and a 21 per cent drop in its support services division, the Financial Times reported.

Credit Suisse has picked Frankfurt as a key post-Brexit centre for its investment banking and capital markets business and has already moved several hundred million dollars of assets to support the new hub, the Financial Times reported. The corporate manoeuvres to create the new structure are revealed in the notes to Credit Suisse’s expectation-beating second-quarter earnings the bank reported on Tuesday. The Swiss group, one of the last big international banks to reveal its post-Brexit plans, is also moving 50 traders to Madrid, as reported earlier this week, and recently c