Headlines

Staff levels in Irish Nationwide Building Society’s credit risk function were inadequate, an inquiry into alleged regulatory breaches at the building society before the financial crisis has been told, the Irish Times reported. Giving evidence to the public inquiry on Wednesday was Frank Casey, who joined Irish Nationwide in 2003 from Bank of Ireland. Mr Casey was a commercial lending administrator at the building society, involved in rating and reviewing the credit risk of commercial mortgages.

Indonesia will hand over a luxury yacht seized on the resort island of Bali to U.S. authorities, police said Wednesday, giving the Justice Department an elusive asset connected to a $4.5 billion fraud case centered on the Malaysian state fund 1MDB, The Wall Street Journal reported. Daniel Silitonga, Indonesia’s chief police investigator in seizure of the yacht Equanimity, said police would transfer control over the $250 million, 300-foot vessel “in a few days” upon the completion of legal arrangements.

A wording on the “full release” of claims by senior creditors could absolve Noble legal debt claims, Singapore Business Review reported. According to Bloomberg, experts are raising concerns about Noble’s debt restructuring plan. On page 5 of Noble’s restructuring term sheet, a clause states that the arrangement provides the “full release of any and all other claims” that any senior creditor may have against Noble Group, its management, directors, advisers, agents and representatives in relation to its existing senior debt.

Former shareholders in Banco Popular, which was sold for €1 to Santander last June after being put into resolution, have opened up two fresh fronts in their battle to seek compensation for their losses, Reuters reported. A group, led by Mexican billionaire Antonio del Valle, the Spanish lender’s biggest investor, filed an application on Monday in the US federal district court for the Southern District of New York asking Santander to reveal information regarding its purchase of Banco Popular.

The rapidity and size of China’s debt boom in the past decade has been almost entirely without precedent. The few precedents that do exist — Japan in the 1980s, the US in the 1920s — are not encouraging, the Financial Times reported. Most coverage has rightly focused on China’s corporate sector, particularly the debts that state-owned enterprises owe to the big four state-owned banks. After all, these liabilities constitute the biggest bulk of the total debt outstanding, and also explain most of the total growth in Chinese debt since the mid-2000s.

Brazilian telecoms company Oi SA’s board has approved the terms of a debt-for-equity swap endorsed by creditors, even as a shareholder said on Tuesday it had won a partial injunction against the plan. In a Tuesday securities filing, Oi said the board approved the issuance of up to 1,756,054,163 new shares, corresponding to a maximum 12.29 billion reais ($3.81 billion). Under the deal, unsecured bondholders will be able to participate in the capitalization of Oi by swapping a portion of their debt for shares in the company, as agreed in a restructuring plan creditors approved in December.

Dixon’s Carphone is winding up its telecoms operator, iD Mobile, after the business failed to attract enough customers to be viable, the Irish Times reported. The Carphone Warehouse owner established ID in 2015 to facilitate competition in the wake of Three’s take over of rival O2. Dixon’s said on Tuesday that iD was unable to grow its business sufficiently against the established operators and its losses became unsustainable.

The European Central Bank is being dragged into local controversies over issues ranging from banking scandals to bribery, underlining the mounting political pressures on the world’s No. 2 central bank as it takes on a vastly expanded role, The Wall Street Journal reported. Three of the ECB’s 25 policy makers, a group that includes central-bank governors from 19 eurozone countries, are currently entwined in domestic investigations—in Latvia, Slovenia and Greece—and other top officials have faced pressure to resign.

Finland’s Ahtium Oyj, previously named Talvivaara Mining Company, which ran a troubled nickel mine in northern Finland, has filed for bankruptcy after failing to secure financing for future projects, it said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Ahtium is the former owner of the mine that leaked waste water in 2012 and faced serious production problems, prompting the Finnish government to take control of the mine in 2015 in an effort to protect local jobs and the environment.

Creditors of insolvent German airline Air Berlin are considering whether to sue its major shareholder Etihad for billions of euros in damages, a spokesperson for the airline's insolvency administrator, Lucas Floether, says. The creditors' committee is scheduled to meet on Monday to discuss putting the claim forward. German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that Floether expected the airline to demand either 1 billion or several billion euros in damages, depending on whether the claim came from Holding Air Berlin or its subsidiary, Air Berlin Luftverkehrs KG.