Headlines

Greece will need a "credible package" of measures to help deal with its oversize debt as it leaves its eight-year international bailout program in August, the European Commission's vice president said Friday. Helping Greece manage its debt, which stands at just under 180 percent of gross domestic product, is one of the crucial elements of an agreement on the country's bailout exit, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. Greece hopes to hammer out the deal with creditors at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers on June 21.

The European Central Bank could relaunch its bond-buying program again in future if the region’s economy was hit by an economic downturn, Belgian Central Bank governor Jan Smets said on Friday. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smets said the ECB was confident that growth was broad and resilient enough that price pressures will lift inflation to the bank’s target. That allowed the bank to announce on Thursday that it will gradually end its bond-buying program by year’s end, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Abraaj, the Middle East’s biggest private equity firm, has filed a petition in the Cayman Islands, asking the court to appoint PwC as provisional liquidators for the embattled company, Reuters reported. “The appointment of provisional liquidators imposes a moratorium on the enforcement of all unsecured claims against the company, allowing time for a proposal to be put to creditors for the orderly restructuring of the company,” it said in a statement.

In a related story, Reuters reported that a family involved with Abraaj handed over debt exposure to the private equity firm to a little-known fund that has now filed a petition against Abraaj, deepening its financial woes, sources said. An adviser to the Jafar family said the family was not party to the legal proceedings started by Auctus Fund in the Cayman Islands against Abraaj, although Hamid Jafar had provided Abraaj with a private loan which has since been transferred to Auctus. Dubai-based Abraaj has declined to comment on the petition.

Argentina’s central bank is getting a new chief after the monetary authority failed to stop the peso’s plunge despite obtaining the biggest loan in the history of the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg News reported. Luis Caputo, previously the finance minister, will take over the post following Federico Sturzenegger’s surprise resignation. Investors need him to lay out a strategy to curb volatility in the currency, which has lost more than a quarter of its value since the end of April, including a selloff of more than 6 percent Thursday that left it at a record low.

Greece’s parliament approved the last big austerity package of its eight-year bailout program Thursday, preparing the country for its full return to financing itself on bond markets beginning this summer, The Wall Street Journal reported. Greek lawmakers from the ruling coalition, led by the left-wing Syriza party of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, passed a package of measures including pension cuts, income-tax rises and privatizations. The overhauls are required for the country to receive about €11 billion of financing from the eurozone’s bailout fund.

A trade war with the United States looms. Populists have taken power in Italy, posing a new threat to the euro. Growth is sluggish, and there is even talk of another banking crisis, the International New York Times reported. It would not seem the ideal time to put the brakes on Europe’s economy. But that is what the European Central Bank is preparing to do. For more than a decade, the central bank unleashed a wave of cash to stimulate growth, effectively saving Europe from the wrenching consequences of its debt crisis.

First the good news. The ECB has signalled that its key interest rate will remain at zero until after the summer of next year, the Irish Times reported. So the regime of rock bottom interest rates which has benefited Irish borrowers is set to continue well into 2019, with many analysts saying interest rates will not rise until December 2019 or early 2020. Those with tracker mortgages will continue to benefit from extraordinarily low rates, while borrowers on standard variable rates should not see any increase either. Competition for new borrowers will continue.

Jho Low, the alleged mastermind of one of the world’s largest purported frauds, has reached out to authorities in Malaysia, offering to drop his claim to more than a billion dollars in assets in return for immunity from criminal prosecution, according to people familiar with the offer, The Wall Street Journal reported. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad rejected the offer, which was communicated via an intermediary, the people said. Mr. Low, who the U.S.

Germany’s ThyssenKrupp, under increasing pressure from the activist hedge fund Elliott Management, is scrambling to renegotiate the terms of a proposed European merger with Tata Steel, according to people familiar with talks between the companies. The industrial group and its Indian rival are in the final stages of creating a steelmaking powerhouse with revenues of €15bn that would be Europe’s second-largest producer of the metal, behind ArcelorMittal, the Financial Times reported.