Headlines

Tati, the iconic cut-price shop whose historic store stands near Paris's Sacre Coeur monument, is to be sold to domestic rival Gifi, said a lawyer involved in Tati's restructuring process, Reuters reported. Thomas Hollande, the son of former French President Francois Hollande who was acting as a lawyer for Tati's employees, said the deal would save the bulk of jobs at Tati and keep the brand alive. "This offer will let around 85 percent of staff stay on, which is more than most could have hoped for," Hollande told reporters. The full financial terms of the takeover were not disclosed.

A bankruptcy trustee has started an international tender to sell the assets of Slovakia Steel Mills mini-mill in eastern Slovakia, the trustee firm SSR said. The mill with annual capacity of 620,000 tonnes of steel billets and a rolling mill operation was opened in 2011 in the eastern town of Strazske, but fell into bankruptcy in 2015, and the operations have been mothballed, Reuters reported. "Subject of the sale of the properties represents mainly the key equipment, buildings, other operating assets supporting the production process," a sale notice on the trustee's website said.

The International Monetary Fund had suspicions about Mozambique’s hidden loans almost a year before the government finally admitted it had undisclosed debt, email exchanges between the fund and the government show. The communications, seen by Bloomberg and confirmed by the IMF, show for the first time how the fund sought to uncover the state’s concealment of its borrowings as far back as May 2015, Bloomberg News reported. The government’s eventual disclosure in April 2016 of more than $1 billion of previously hidden loans led the fund and 14 donor countries to freeze aid last year.

China may finally be ready to cut the cord when it comes to the country’s troubled local government financing vehicles, Bloomberg News reported. Beijing’s deleveraging drive has seen rules impacting LGFV debt refinancing tightened, spurring a slump in issuance by the vehicles, which owe about 5.6 trillion yuan ($818 billion) to bondholders and are seen by some as the poster children for China’s post-financial crisis debt woes.

Germany sounded the alarm over Italy’s latest bank bailout, saying the apparent bending of European Union rules casts doubt on efforts to further integrate the euro zone, Bloomberg News reported. The government in Rome announced the country’s biggest bank rescue to date on Sunday evening as it committed as much as 17 billion euros ($19 billion) to clean up two failed banks. While the European Commission approved the plan, German officials pointed to the involvement of state aid to shield senior creditors from losses as working around EU law established to deal with bank failures.

Embattled airbag maker Takata Corp on Monday filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan and said it would seek $1.588 billion in financial aid from U.S.-based auto parts supplier Key Safety Systems (KSS), Reuters reported. The KSS deal would help it deal with the fallout from its defective airbag inflators at the centre of the global auto industry's biggest ever recall, the two companies said in a joint statement. The filing at the Tokyo District Court followed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing in the United States.

Kenya's central bank said on Friday it planned to extend the receivership of Imperial Bank by a year to help finalise a deal with a strategic investor to take a stake in the bank, Reuters reported. The regulator also said it had granted a licence to a new locally owned bank, Mayfair Bank Limited, the second such licence since 2015, when it imposed a moratorium on approving new lenders.

Oi SA has unveiled a plan that facilitates the early repayment of small debts to suppliers and contractors, as Brazil's No. 4 wireless carrier seeks to emerge faster from creditor protection, Reuters reported. The plan was made public in newspaper ads on Friday. Under its terms, all creditors will be eligible for an early repayment of their debts to a maximum limit of 50,000 reais ($15,000) each. According to Chief Executive Officer Marco Schroeder, the plan seeks Oi's so-called Classes 1, 3 and 4 of creditors to negotiate ahead of a vote on the carrier's bankruptcy plan.

Mozambican state companies have failed to account for about a quarter of the proceeds of $2 billion in loans being investigated, according to a report by Kroll LLC that creditors said was needed for debt restructuring talks to start, Bloomberg News reported. “At least $500 million of expenditure of a potentially sensitive nature remains unaudited and unexplained,” Kroll said in the report, commissioned last year by Mozambique’s attorney general. Credit Suisse Group AG and VTB Bank PJSC were paid almost $200 million in fees for arranging the loans, the New York-based investigator said.

Italy will take the next step to wind down two failed banks in the northern Veneto region when the government meets to adopt a plan that may smooth the sale of the stricken lenders’ assets to another firm, Bloomberg News reported. The Finance Ministry said late on Friday that all measures would be taken to ensure that senior creditors and depositors of Banca Popolare di Vicenza SpA and Veneto Banca SpA would be protected in a wind-down under the national insolvency law, and customers would see no interruption in service.