Headlines

Testimony began Thursday in the impeachment trial of suspended Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, amid occasional shouting matches and mutual accusations between opposing lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. “From now on, you will be judges,” Ricardo Lewandowski, the chief justice of Brazil’s Supreme Court, said in his opening remarks, reminding senators of the role they will play in a trial that is expected to conclude by next week. But from the start, the process took on overtly political overtones. Senators who have publicly supported Ms.

Credit ratings agency Moody's said on Wednesday the restructuring plan put forward by Spanish renewable energy and engineering firm Abengoa would reduce its debt burden, but it was unclear whether it would be successful, Reuters reported. Abengoa, which had been negotiating since November to cut its more than 9 billion euros ($10 billion) of debt, reached a restructuring deal earlier in August with its main creditors in an attempt to avoid becoming Spain's biggest ever bankruptcy.

Proposals to toughen penalties for tax evasion have been published, as the authorities prepare to receive a big tranche of new data on offshore accounts, the Financial Times reported. The government is proposing new legislation requiring taxpayers with outstanding offshore tax liabilities to come forward by September 2018, after which they will be subject to a new set of sanctions for “failing to correct”. The move is part of a broader toughening of sanctions for all those involved in offshore tax evasion.

Mortgage approvals in the UK slumped to a 1½-year low in the month after the Brexit vote, according to a high street banking report. Loans for house purchases slipped 5 per cent to an 18-month low of 37,662 in July, down from 39,763 in June, according to the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), the Irish Times reported. The setback comes amid a good week for the property sector, with housebuilder Persimmon shrugging off uncertainty surrounding the EU referendum result to post a 19 per cent rise in pre-tax profits.

The commodity super-cycle that peaked in 2011 powered Mongolia to world-beating growth. Then came the bust and China’s recent economic slowdown that’s pushed the land of Genghis Khan into an unprecedented economic crisis this summer. Yet even though the commodity market finally has a pulse again after a five-year collapse, a modest revival in prices isn’t going to be enough to rescue Mongolia’s mineral-rich, $12 billion economy. What worked for Mongolia in 2011 isn’t working now.

Studio City Macau, Lawrence Ho and James Packer’s $4.5 billion integrated casino resort on the Cotai Strip is in trouble and could default on the $1.41 billion loan used to complete the construction of the hotel, Casino.org reported. That’s the word from rating agency Standard and Poor’s Financial Services, which this week issued a negative outlook for the resort’s bonds, off the back of a 42.5 percent slide in their value. Macau’s first ever TV and movie-themed resort opened in October 2015.

Oil and gas companies operating in Norway, western Europe’s biggest producer, cut investment forecasts further for this year and next as they continue to weather a two-year long collapse in crude prices, Bloomberg News reported. Investments in Norway’s offshore oil and gas industry are now expected to fall to 163 billion kroner ($20 billion) in 2016, down from a 166 billion-krone estimate in May, according to a quarterly survey published by Statistic Norway on Wednesday. The estimate for 2017 fell to 151 billion kroner from 153 billion kroner.

China’s debt pile is huge and – more worryingly – growing fast. And credit isn’t delivering the same kind of economic boost it once did. But most debt is in local hands in a largely closed financial system, giving China’s leaders some breathing space to fix the mess. And that’s good for the global economy, Bloomberg News reported. China’s total debt is now about two and a half times the size of its economy. It takes almost a third of gross domestic product just to service it. Corporations are by far the biggest debtors, especially state-owned enterprises.

The former head of Royal Bank of Scotland said in 2009 it could take up to five years to recover from the biggest bank bailout in British history, the Irish Times reported. At the time, this seemed a formidable period for British taxpayers to wait before receiving some of their money back. But nearly eight years on, and under a new chief executive, RBS is still some way off from returning to private ownership. The bank reported a £2 billion loss for the first half of this year, putting it on track for its ninth successive annual loss.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that Moscow has no money available to raise pensions further in line with last year’s high inflation rate, news that is likely to be unwelcome ahead of parliamentary elections in September, The Wall Street Journal reported. “We don’t possess enough resources to carry out [an] extra pension adjustment,” Mr. Medvedev said Tuesday at a meeting with government officials. The cost of living has skyrocketed in Russia in recent months, driven by a massive drop in the ruble’s value and the government’s ban on Western food imports.