Headlines

Russia’s VTB Capital-led Numetal Mauritius Pvt Ltd. today told the company law appellate tribunal that it has offered over Rs 37,000 crore for Essar Steel Ltd. in the second round of bidding, Bloomberg Quint reported. The second round should be opened and the highest bidder selected from it, Numetal told the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal. ArcelorMittal, the only other bidder to have put in a bid for Essar Steel in the first round in February, however, opposed the opening of the second round of bids and sought only the first round of bids to be considered.

Not long ago China was a leading culprit in global economic imbalances. Whether blame was ascribed to its undervalued yuan or its frugal people, the problem seemed clear. China was selling a lot abroad and buying too little back, The Economist reported. One data-point summed this up: its currentaccount surplus reached 10% of GDP in 2007, well above the level that is generally seen as reasonable. Far less attention has been paid to its steady decline since then.

Bond fund managers often scoff at the big racy bets of equity investors, preferring the sweet sensation of a steady, diversified stream of coupon payments being made on time, the Financial Times reported. Michael Hasenstab is not like most bond investors.

A U.S. bankruptcy court is set to hear a dispute involving Brazilian telecoms company Oi SA and major shareholder Bratel Brasil SA, Bratel said on Wednesday, as investor discontent with Oi’s bankruptcy reorganization process shows no signs of abating, Reuters reported. On Friday, Bratel, a subsidiary of Portugal’s Pharol SGPS SA, which owns almost 28 percent of Oi’s common shares, said it had filed a legal complaint in the United States.

Bosses of the collapsed construction firm Carillion should face an inquiry into their fitness to serve as directors after they masked the company’s financial ill-health with accounting tricks before its failure, Members of Parliament said on Wednesday. Carillion, which employed 43,000 people to provide services in defence, education, health and transport, collapsed in January, becoming the largest construction bankruptcy in British history, Reuters reported. It left creditors and the firm’s pensioners facing steep losses and put thousands of jobs at risk.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s prospects for bailing out his younger brother’s phone company are fading after an Indian tribunal put his sibling’s Reliance Communications Ltd. into insolvency proceedings, which prohibit “connected persons” from acquiring assets of delinquent borrowers, Bloomberg News reported. Ambani is India’s richest man and the founder of upstart rival Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., which had agreed in December to pay about $3.7 billion for airwaves, towers and fiber assets of the company known as RCom.

Employees at South African audit firm Nkonki Inc. applied to a Pretoria court to block the company’s liquidation and have it put into administration instead so there’s a chance the business can be rescued, according to a court filing. The auditing profession is under pressure in South Africa with Nkonki and the local unit of KPMG LLP losing clients after being linked to the politically connected Gupta family, Bloomberg News reported. Deloitte & Touche LLP is also under scrutiny for having audited scandal-ridden South African retailer Steinhoff International Holdings NV.

Australia’s unemployment rate edged up to a 9-month high in April, despite an increase in the number of full-time roles, the Financial Times reported. Australia’s unemployment rate rose to seasonally-adjusted 5.6 per cent in April from 5.5 per cent in the previous month, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That was above the 5.5 per cent forecast in a Reuters poll and broke from a four-month run at the same level.

The UK is teaming up with Standard Chartered Bank to lend $100m to Zimbabwean companies in what will be the British government’s first direct commercial loan to the southern African nation’s private sector in more than 20 years, the Financial Times reported. The loan is the biggest sign of a thaw in the UK-Zimbabwe relationship since London imposed sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s regime in the early 2000s. The rapprochement follows Mr Mugabe’s forced resignation in November in a “soft coup” that ended his 37-year rule.

Italian stocks and government bonds came under heavy pressure from reports that coalition talks between the two leading populist parties could result in a government that breaks with eurozone economic orthodoxy, the Financial Times reported. According to the reports, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and far-right League had discussed proposals to ask the European Central Bank to write off about €250bn of its holdings of Italian debt, and to call for the creation of a mechanism to exit the euro.