Headlines

Lloyds Banking Group revealed a £100 million (€116.7 million) compensation scheme on Friday for victims of a fraud, for which six people were jailed this year, as Britain’s financial watchdog reopened an inquiry into the case, the Irish Times reported on a Reuters story. Britain’s biggest mortgage lender has been under pressure to compensate the victims at its HBOS business, who say it reacted too slowly to their complaints, and will hope that this will draw a line under the controversy.

Odebrecht SA is rewarding some bondholders while others get burned, Bloomberg News reported. Notes issued by the holding company and backed by the construction arm plunged Wednesday after newspaper Valor Economico reported executives had told creditors that it will inevitably file for bankruptcy. The bonds are the worst performers in Brazil this year, losing more than a third of their value, as speculation mounted the scandal-tainted builder would struggle to meet its obligations.

Croatia passed an emergency law on Thursday aimed at protecting the economy from big company failures as Agrokor, the country's largest private firm, seeks to resolve its debt crisis, the International New York Times reported. The centre-right majority in parliament approved the law, which will be implemented if Agrokor fails to reach a deal with banks and suppliers on a cash injection and restructuring.

The first ever downgrade of a Chinese local-government financing vehicle by an international ratings agency is reigniting concern over the debt-saddled entities, amid angst there could be more cuts to come, Bloomberg News reported. S&P Global Ratings reduced its credit rating on Jiangsu NewHeadline Development Group, a construction services provider and one of the largest financing firms owned by Lianyungang City -- in China’s eastern Jiangsu province -- by one notch to BB Thursday.

As Greece continues talks with creditors over the next stages of its international bailout programme, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, has warned that it is “no success story” yet. Further discussions will take place at the meeting of EU finance ministers in Malta on Friday. Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has called for an emergency summit of EU leaders if a deal is not struck by the end of the week, the Financial Times reported.

The Bank of England’s corporate-bond purchases, one of the stimulus measures announced after the Brexit vote, could conclude as early as this month as the program nears its 10-billion pound ($12.5 billion) target, Bloomberg News reported. After starting purchases in September, BOE officials have found investors more willing to sell company debt than they expected and are on track to meet their target within weeks.

The European Central Bank’s inner circle faced a push from heads of member states’ monetary authorities to drop the doom and gloom from its rhetoric and present a much more optimistic outlook on the eurozone’s economic prospects at its policy vote last month, the Financial Times reported. Accounts of the latest meeting, published Thursday, reveal the scale of the discord between president Mario Draghi and the heads of the German, French and Dutch central banks over the ECB’s assessment of the economy.

Iceland’s former three big banks — Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki — became poster boys for the excesses among lenders around the world before the 2008 financial crisis, the Financial Times reported.

Mozambique’s attorney-general asked the country’s banks to provide details of former President Armando Guebuza’s accounts as part of an audit of $2 billion of previously undisclosed government loans, Bloomberg News reported. The office requested the information about Guebuza and 17 other individuals and an institution for the period January 2012 to December 2016, according to a letter sent to the country’s banks and obtained by Bloomberg.

Seadrill Ltd., once the crown jewel of billionaire John Fredriksen’s business empire, is at the mercy of short-term speculators as the biggest funds shun the offshore driller amid a struggle to avoid bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. “It’s trading at option value and day traders are the ones pushing the price up and down,” Anders Bergland, an analyst at Clarksons Platou Securities AS, said Tuesday, right after the company again warned shareholders and bond investors they were facing steep losses in any restructuring deal.