Headlines

Retailer Steinhoff’s South African lenders have backed a move to prop up its troubled European operations with liquidity from healthier South African subsidiaries as the group scrambles to close a funding gap, Reuters reported. A first instalment of 60 million euros ($73 million) of a total 200 million it is seeking will be received this week, Steinhoff said in a statement on Thursday, adding it was seeking consent for further instalments.

There are fewer bad loans on the balance sheets of European banks but they remain high, the European Commission said on Thursday as it prepares to push through measures to force higher provisioning for soured debt despite the opposition of big lenders, Reuters reported. The 2008-2009 global financial crisis left European banks saddled with piles of non-performing loans (NPLs) which they struggled to recoup from distressed firms and households. But as the bloc’s economy recovers, the amount of bad debt is slowly receding, the European Commission said in a report.

There is a “clear danger” that South Africa’s state-owned power utility, Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., could default on its debt, S&P Global Ratings said. “We are very concerned about liquidity issues,” Konrad Reuss, the managing director of S&P for sub-Saharan Africa, said at an event in Johannesburg Thursday. Eskom is the biggest recipient of state guarantees at a time when domestic power demand is the lowest in more than 10 years and as South Africa’s finances buckle under lower tax revenue and rising debt, Bloomberg News reported.

A senior EU official says Greece is close to passing its next bailout review, putting the country within reach of ending its eight-year rescue program that saved it from bankruptcy but required hugely painful austerity cuts, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. The official said that eurozone finance ministers meeting next week had "a great willingness to say that, basically, nearly everything had been done" to complete Greece's latest bailout review. That would further pave the way for the program to end in August.

The level of “non-performing loans” in Ireland continues to decline significantly, falling by close to 20 per cent in the year to June 2017, the Irish Times reported. The decline is due largely to the widespread use of loan restructuring solutions, the European Commission reports. The non-performing loan (NPL) ratio – the percentage of total gross loans and advances – came down from 14.6 per cent in June 2016 to 11.6 per cent in June 2017. The figures are part of a Europe-wide study of NPLs which finds that the legacy of the financial crisis is still not behind us.

In the battle for insolvent Austrian airline Niki, its founder Niki Lauda sought to woo employees in an open letter on Wednesday by promising jobs to all current staff, Reuters reported. An agreed sale of Niki to British Airways owner IAG, brokered by Niki’s German administrator, was thrown into doubt last week by two court rulings saying Austria was the relevant jurisdiction for the insolvency proceedings.

Venezuelan debt is kicking off 2018 on a tear. The nation’s bonds, which led global losses in 2017 after the government declared it needed to restructure its debt, have returned a world-leading 12 percent, Bloomberg News reported. That’s four times what investors got from second-place Tajikistan, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The euro extended its decline from the highs it hit in overnight action after a top European Central Bank policymaker said he was “concerned” about the currency’s sharp rally, the Financial Times reported. In early London trade, the shared currency fell 0.29 per cent from Tuesday’s 10pm GMT fix to $1.2230. It had traded as high as $1.2322 overnight. Traders have been keeping close tabs on negotiations in US Congress aimed at staving off a government shutdown at the end of this week.

Royal Bank of Scotland staff helping small firms to restructure debt during the financial crisis were given a list of ways to squeeze more money from struggling clients and told to "Just Hit Budget!", a memo released on Wednesday showed. The release of the 2008 document by the British Parliament's Treasury Select Committee (TSC) comes ahead of a debate by lawmakers on Thursday on the treatment of small business customers by the bank's Global Restructuring Group (GRG), the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Dalian Wanda Group has agreed to sell its interests in the high-profile London luxury development project, One Nine Elms, for 59 million pounds, the latest in a string of asset sales that underscore financial strains hitting the Chinese conglomerate, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The conglomerate, which has businesses that range from real estate to football and cinemas, had initially said it wanted to transfer ownership of some its overseas assets to its holding company as part of a restructuring, keeping them within the group.