Headlines

Ever since the price of oil collapsed in mid-2014, there’s been a broad consensus among the bond-market crowd that Venezuela was going to default. Not immediately, they said, but at some point down the road. Three years on, that time may have arrived, Bloomberg News reported. On Friday, the government-run oil giant PDVSA owes $985 million. Six days later, it’s on the hook for another $1.2 billion. Not only is that a daunting sum for a country whose foreign-currency reserves recently dipped below $10 billion for the first time in 15 years, but it figures to be a logistical nightmare too.

Like the organiser of a fireworks display, Mario Draghi is about to light the blue touch paper on the European Central Bank’s bonfire of quantitative easing and trust that he does not ignite unwanted blazes in the markets. The ECB president on Thursday is widely expected to announce the long-awaited start of tapering, but how the central bank will scale back a bond-buying programme that began in 2015 is the subject of much conjecture, the Financial Times reported.

Britain's financial watchdog is considering further action against Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) for its treatment of struggling companies during and after the financial crisis, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The Financial Conduct Authority on Monday published a detailed summary of a report into RBS's Global Restructuring Group (GRG), after clashing with lawmakers over the disclosure of its full contents. Customers have accused the GRG of pushing ailing firms into bankruptcy to pick up their assets on the cheap.

German airline Air Berlin is demanding damages from its part-owner Etihad Airways for letting it become insolvent and it hopes for payment of at least 10 million euros ($11.8 million), Air Berlin’s administrator told a German newspaper. “We are in negotiations with Etihad and hope to reach a general settlement soon. We are hoping for a two-digit million euro sum,” daily Rheinische Post on Saturday quoted administrator Frank Kebekus as saying.

In a related story, Reuters reported that an Air Berlin airliner was grounded at Iceland’s Keflavik airport late on Thursday because the insolvent German carrier had not paid its airport charges, Keflavik operator Isavia said in a statement. It said the unpaid charges had been incurred before Air Berlin, which has struggled to turn a profit over the last decade, filed for insolvency on Aug. 15. According to German magazine Stern, the Airbus A320 landed at Keflavik at 10:35 p.m. local time on Thursday and was due to depart for Duesseldorf just after midnight.

The judge overseeing phone carrier Oi SA’s bankruptcy case agreed on Friday to give creditors and the company more time to reconcile competing restructuring proposals, 16 months into Brazil’s largest in-court reorganization, Reuters reported. The judge, Fernando Viana, acted on a request filed on Thursday by several creditor groups including state-owned banks and bondholders, court documents showed. A creditors’ meeting to vote on a Oi restructuring plan had been scheduled for Monday, but Viana postponed it until Nov. 6.

Concordia International Corp., stumbling under debt that the Canadian drugmaker piled on during a takeover spree, is seeking to restructure its finances and cut borrowings by at least $2 billion after missing an interest payment Monday on some unsecured bonds, Bloomberg News reported. Management is pursuing a plan under the Canada Business Corporations Act, according to a statement Friday, which didn’t outline any potential terms of a deal but said the company would continue making payments on its secured debt.

Noble Group Ltd. suspended its shares from trading in Singapore on Friday pending the announcement of a major transaction, with the commodity trader seeking to clinch a sale of its oil-trading unit in a deal that may be critical to the company’s prospects for survival, Bloomberg News reported. The stock was halted at 38 Singapore cents, 2.6 percent lower, after the Hong Kong-based company’s announcement, which was released just after midday in the city-state, and didn’t give details of the planned deal. The shares have sunk 78 percent this year amid concerns that Noble Group will default.

European banking union has been an important step forward in the implementation of a fully functioning economic and monetary union. But it remains incomplete, the Financial Times reported. The first two legs — the Single Supervisory Mechanism and the Single Resolution Fund — have been realised, but one is still missing: the European Deposit Insurance Scheme. Several proposals for the third leg have been put forward, but little progress has been made. A widespread view is that no advance can be made on the EDIS until the issues related to banks’ legacy assets are addressed.

The board of Brazilian telecoms regulator Anatel will meet on Monday morning to analyze a request by indebted carrier Oi SA to swap billions of reais in regulatory fines for new investments, a source with knowledge of the situation said Thursday. The board will decide on the fate of almost 5 billion reais ($1.58 billion) in fines the company has accumulated, said the source, who requested anonymity as the matter is private, Reuters reported.