Headlines

Members of Sean Quinn’s family are opposing an application for court orders to stop them receiving any further living expenses out of accounts controlled by receivers appointed over assets linked to Quinn companies, the Irish Times reported. It is alleged the living expense payments from the relevant accounts are no longer necessary because the financial circumstances of a number of family members have changed “significantly” since the living expense orders were made in 2012.

An audit of a key energy group sold by troubled state investment fund 1Malaysia Development Bhd. to a Chinese state-owned nuclear-power company flagged deep uncertainty over the company’s viability. Notes from auditor Deloitte in the 140-page financial accounts of Edra Global Energy Bhd.

Worldview Capital, the Swiss-Cayman Islands hedge fund that is buying Petroceltic International out of examinership, is gaining full control of the business for a knockdown cash payment of $7.8 million, the Irish Times reported. Creditors of Petroceltic will meet next Monday to vote on a scheme of arrangement assembled by the examiner, Michael McAteer of Grant Thornton. The scheme is certain to pass as Worldview is also the biggest creditor.

$2,411,412,137,427. That figure — $2.4 trillion for those with an untrained eye for very large numbers — is in the same ballpark as the annual economic output of France. It is also exactly the amount that people around the world claim they lost when Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based virtual currency exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy in 2014, after huge, unexplained losses of the volatile digital currency Bitcoin, the International New York Times reported. As with most of the people who lost money with Bernard L.

The International Monetary Fund stepped back from confrontation on Greece this week — to the delight of eurozone policy-makers above all in Berlin, the Financial Times reported. After months of squaring up against Germany over the fund’s insistence on upfront measures to ease Greece’s enormous debt burden, the IMF signed off on yet another compromise that delays the day of reckoning and left any commitment on debt restructuring implicit at best.

Banco Popular Español SA will launch a €2.5 billion ($2.8 billion) share sale in an effort to ease investor concerns about its massive pile of soured property loans, The Wall Street Journal reported. Banco Popular, one of Spain’s weakest major lenders, said Thursday it will issue around 2 billion shares at €1.25 each to boost provisions for losses on real-estate loans and assets. The bank’s stock closed at €2.36 on Wednesday. The sale will be a rights issue, with shares offered to existing shareholders at a discount, a common practice in Europe.

Debenhams, the British retail chain with 11 outlets in Ireland employing 2,200 staff, has become embroiled in a row with the Roche family that once owned Roches Stores, the Irish Times reported. Debenhams bought Roches Stores from the Roche family for €29 million in 2006 and rebranded it, although the family held on to the properties. Details of the row have emerged in documents given to the High Court as part of Debenhams’ Irish division’s application for examinership, a form of court protection while it restructures its finances.

A truce between Greece’s creditors averts an immediate panic over Greek bankruptcy this summer, yet as officials and onlookers digested the deal, it became apparent that less was agreed than meets the eye, The Wall Street Journal reported. The deal, struck in the small hours of Wednesday morning at the Eurogroup meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels, broke an impasse between Germany and the International Monetary Fund that was holding up Greece’s bailout funding for this summer.

The state of Rio de Janeiro missed an $8.4 million payment to an international creditor as a debt crisis in Brazil’s state governments deepened amid what the federal Finance Ministry has called “out-of-control personnel expenditures,” The Wall Street Journal reported. The payment, which was due Monday to the French Development Agency, had to be postponed following months in which revenues have fallen short of spending obligations, a person familiar with the matter said.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s campaign to keep Britain in the European Union was bolstered on Wednesday by a report from one of the country’s most authoritative economic research bodies, which concluded that a withdrawal from the bloc would lead to up to two more years of public spending cuts or tax increases, the International New York Times reported. A frequent critic of government economic plans, the research body, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this time delivered some welcome news for Mr. Cameron.