Headlines

The Danish company Nordic Waste has triggered a political scandal by filing for bankruptcy, EuroNews reported. The bankruptcy of the company - which deals with the reprocessing of contaminated soil - could cost taxpayers €27 million. After they post their bankruptcy filing, the Danish state will likely have to pay for the clean-up work required after a mega landslide at a reprocessing plant for contaminated soil. At the beginning of the week, the Ministry of the Environment issued interim injunctions against Nordic Waste. After that ruling, the company declared bankruptcy.

Terraform Labs, the company behind the stablecoin TerraUSD, which collapsed and roiled cryptocurrency markets in 2022, filed for chapter 11 protection, according to court papers filed on Sunday, Reuters reported. Singapore-based Terraform Labs, in a filing with the bankruptcy court in Delaware, listed assets and liabilities in the range of $100-$500 million. Terraform Labs said it would meet all financial obligations to employees and vendors during the Chapter 11 case without requiring additional financing. It also plans to continue Web3 offerings expansion.

More than 47,000 UK companies are on the brink of collapse after a 25% jump in the number of businesses facing “critical” financial distress in the final three months of 2023, according to a report, The Guardian reported. It marks the second consecutive quarter-on-quarter period when critical financial distress has risen by a 25%, the latest “Red Flag” report by insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor found. The construction and property sectors accounted for 30% of all businesses facing critical financial distress.

Cheshire East Council in the United Kingdom is not at risk of going “bankrupt”, said its finance sub-committee chair, the Nantwitch News reported. And if it did ever have to trigger a S114 notice suppliers and staff would be paid, claims Cllr Nick Mannion. He was speaking at the corporate policy committee where the council’s finances were being discussed. He congratulated officers on bringing down the predicted end-of-year overspend to £13m at the end of quarter three – it had been forecast at £18.7m at the end of the second quarter of the financial year.

Premier Li Qiang called for more effective measures to stabilize China’s slumping stock market after the mainland’s benchmark CSI 300 hit a five-year low on Monday, Bloomberg News reported. Chinese stocks have sold off for most of the past year. The factors behind the drop range from the protracted crisis in the housing market to persistent deflationary pressures in the wider economy. Beijing’s policy response, meanwhile, has failed to buttress sentiment among investors hoping for even easier monetary conditions or a big lift in fiscal stimulus.

The number of foreclosed homes in China rose 43% year-on-year in 2023, according to a private survey on Monday, highlighting a worrying trend of rising mortgage delinquencies amid a sustained property market slump and a patchy economic recovery, Reuters reported. The number of foreclosed homes up for auction stood at 389,000 units last year, said China Index Academy, a major independent real estate research firm. A total of 99,000 units worth a combined 150 billion yuan ($20.84 billion) were successfully sold at auctions, the firm said.

Private jets were a rare pandemic winner in the otherwise decimated travel business. Now that they are coming back down to earth, one heavily indebted operator could give the industry a hard landing, the Wall Street Journal reported. Based in Malta, privately owned VistaJet grew at breakneck speed after 2019 to become the world’s second-largest flier of private jets.

South Korea will take steps to make its financial markets more investor friendly and attractive to foreigners, the financial regulator said on Monday, Reuters reported. The comments by vice chairman of the Financial Services Commission (FSC), Kim So-young, came at a meeting with foreign financial firms in Seoul to discuss ways of helping them expand business, in the wake of November's ban on short-selling. "The government will make various efforts to globalise the financial industry, especially to build a more favourable environment for foreign financial firms," Kim said.

Just when apparel retailers thought supply-chain disruptions were behind them, they are staring down yet another bottleneck in the Red Sea. While the resulting shipping-cost surges are nowhere near the sticker shock seen in 2021, uneven delivery schedules come with the risk of out-of-season merchandise and heavy discounts, the Wall Street Journal reported. Houthi rebels in Yemen have been attacking commercial ships traveling through the Red Sea since November, prompting companies to reroute ships containing everything from clothes to furniture around the southern tip of Africa.

Global financial regulators will present the G20 in October their findings from a "deep dive" on how social media can speed up bank deposit outflows and changes to liquidity rules are needed, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) said on Monday, Reuters reported. Posts on social media helped to speed up outflows from Silicon Valley Bank, one of several U.S. lenders that failed last year.