Headlines

The head of Scotland’s government met with European Union leaders in Brussels Wednesday for talks about protecting the country’s interests in the bloc, as different parts of the U.K. begin to jostle for new arrangements following last week’s vote, The Wall Street Journal reported. A majority of voters in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Gibraltar favored staying in the EU in last Thursday’s referendum while the U.K. overall voted to leave the bloc by a narrow margin.

Italy is eyeing a multibillion-euro rescue of its ailing banks, using the market turbulence triggered by the UK’s Brexit vote as an excuse to sidestep strict rules against state support for lenders, the Financial Times reported. Following a further hit on Italian bank shares in the wake of the UK referendum, Matteo Renzi, Italian premier, has resurrected ideas to shore up a sector that is fast becoming one the eurozone’s weakest links, say bankers and officials.

A unit of distressed debt firm Aurelius Capital Management LP asked a Dutch court on Monday to start bankruptcy proceedings against a Netherlands subsidiary of phone company Oi SA, which last week filed Brazil's largest-ever bankruptcy protection request. Aurelius unit Syzygy Capital Management Ltd owns bonds sold by Oi Brasil Holdings Coöperatief UA, a Netherlands subsidiary of the Brazilian phone company, Aurelius said in a statement on Monday. Oi confirmed the "involuntary bankruptcy" filing by Syzygy in the Dutch court in a statement later on Monday.

The regulator that monitors UK financial reporting is to investigate two of the big four accountancy firms over their role in the failures of the retailer BHS and the banking group HBOS, The Guardian reported. The Financial Reporting Council, responsible for overseeing UK accounting standards, began an investigation into PricewaterhouseCoopers over its audit of the collapsed high street chain BHS when it was owned by Sir Philip Green.

The Bank of Japan can hold off on expanding monetary stimulus if market turbulence caused by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union proves temporary, a former central bank executive said on Monday, the Irish Times reported. But Japan has the right to intervene in markets to stem sharp yen rises based on a shared understanding among G7 and G20 nations that excessive currency moves are undesirable, said Kazuo Momma, who was the BOJ’s executive director overseeing international affairs until May.

Brunswick Rail Ltd., the Russian railcar lessor struggling to repay foreign debt following a plunge in the ruble, issued a last-ditch bond-restructure plan after talks with creditors broke down. The company is giving holders of $600 million of bonds due in November next year the option of either cashing out 51 percent of the notes’ face value in rubles or getting a 38 percent payout and new payment-in-kind notes, also in rubles, which would give creditors the right to acquire as much as 25 percent of equity, according to a Brunswick statement.

After Brexit, creditors may be impacted when assets of insolvent companies are sought for recovery in Europe. This was the view set out today by R3, the trade body for insolvency professionals, in a statement covering how the EU referendum result may affect the corporate insolvency process. Andrew Tate, president of R3, said: “Leaving the EU will have a major impact on the way corporate insolvency works in the UK. The UK’s insolvency regime does not exist in a vacuum. It is entwined with rules on employment, tax, property, and more; and all of these are linked with European rules.

The International Monetary Fund has added its voice to the growing diplomatic clamor for an international audit of Mozambique’s finances. IMF staff traveled to Mozambique in recent days to confer with its government on a worsening economic performance and poor financial governance after more than $1 billion of previously secret loans were disclosed to international donors and investors in April.

The sale of billions of pounds of taxpayer-owned shares in bailed-out UK banks has been shelved as a result of stock market turmoil spurred by the vote to leave the EU, the Financial Times reported. Plans to start the sale of £2bn of retail shares in Lloyds Banking Group over the next six months have been dropped owing to economic uncertainty following the referendum result, according to government advisers, dealing a blow to UK taxpayers.

As Russia’s government counts the months to an economic rebound, a bellwether of investment is nearing levels of distress last seen during the throes of a recession seven years ago, Bloomberg News reported. Building completions plunged 9 percent from a year earlier in May, the worst showing since October, even as industrial production grew for a second month and consumer indicators from real wages to unemployment improved.