Headlines

Steinhoff's creditors have agreed to hold on their debt claims for three years, the embattled retailer said on Friday, throwing a lifeline for the South African retailer caught in the throes of an accounting scandal, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The parties will now seek to implement the restructuring within three months, the retailer, which has more than 40 retail brands including Conforama, Poundland and Mattress Firm, said.

Royal Bank of Scotland said a scheme to compensate small firms hurt by its restructuring unit will close to new complaints after it paid out just 10 million pounds so far for direct losses, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. RBS announced the scheme in November 2016 and set aside 400 million pounds to compensate thousands of small businesses that say they were mistreated by RBS's Global Restructuring Group (GRG).

Preparations for a no-deal Brexit are ramping up in Europe, as the public and private sectors brace for a hard break-up that would hit long-term EU economic output by up to 1.5 per cent, the Financial Times reported. Yet Brussels’ drive to prepare for the worst also highlights one of the big impediments to planning: authorities are not revealing the steps they will take to mitigate the “serious disruption” expected in the aftermath of a hard Brexit.

Burry’s Shipyard has filed for protection under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. The Clarenville business filed a notice of intention (NOI) to make a proposal under subsection 50.4(1) of the BIA on July 10, The Telegram reported. Deloitte Restructuring Inc. were appointed as the licensed insolvency trustee. According to a statement on Deloitte's website to the creditors of the shipyard, the effect of the NOI filing is an automatic stay of proceedings against all creditors from commencing any actions against Burry’s.

IBBI Chief M.S. Sahoo on Thursday said the process to put in place a framework for cross-border insolvency cases is under way. The government is keen to introduce a globally accepted and well-recognised cross-border insolvency framework, which would also make India an attractive investment destination for foreign creditors, given the increased predictability and certainty of the insolvency process, The Hindu reported. Asked about the status of cross-border insolvency, Mr. Sahoo said, comments have been invited.. and have also been received.

It is not easy to make a financial crisis sound boring. This week Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner almost did that, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. With the 10-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse approaching, the three luminaries — who were respectively US Federal Reserve chairman, Treasury secretary and New York Federal Reserve president in 2008 — have been talking to the media about the crisis. And their verdict is sanguine — if not a little smug.

Like other countries, China has bureaucratic infighting. But it does better than most at keeping tussles hidden from outside view, especially under Xi Jinping, a president who brooks no dissent. So it has been highly unusual to see a spat between the central bank and finance ministry spill into the open, The Economist reported. It reveals cracks in the government’s façade of unity as a campaign to control debt exacts a toll on the economy. The disagreement started on July 13th when Xu Zhong, head of the central bank’s research department, spoke at a forum in Beijing.

Former traders for Barclays and Deutsche Bank were sentenced to a combined 13 years in prison by a London judge for conspiring to rig interest-rate benchmarks, the Irish Times reported. Christian Bittar (46), a Deutsche Bank employee, was sentenced to five years and four months, while the man described by prosecutors as his fellow mastermind in manipulating the market, Barclays’ Philippe Moryoussef, received eight years. The 50-year-old Moryoussef was sentenced in absentia after staying in France to avoid the trial.

If it walks and quacks like an emerging markets balance of payments crisis, is it really an emerging markets balance of payments crisis? We are not yet there, and hopefully it will not come to one. But the patterns recently displayed by global financial markets are sufficiently redolent of capital flight from poorer countries in the past that caution is in order, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. Start with foreign exchange. In the second quarter emerging markets currencies had their worst fall in seven years.

The European Union’s bank-failure rules are forcing Austria’s Volksbanken to open up the lending tap, a strategy reminiscent of the one that nearly brought down the cooperative group a few years ago, Bloomberg News reported. The irony has arisen because the EU requires banks to have sufficient loss-absorbing liabilities on their books to cover the costs of their restructuring and refinancing in a crisis, avoiding the sort of massive public bailout that kept Volksbanken alive in 2012.