Headlines

British department stores group BHS collapsed into administration on Monday, putting about 11,000 jobs at risk. Philip Duffy and Benjamin Wiles, managing directors of Duff & Phelps, have been appointed joint administrators, the restructuring firm said. “The group will continue to trade as usual whilst the administrators seek to sell it as a going concern,” it said. BHS employs about 8,000 people, while 3,000 contractors work with the 88-year-old firm which has 164 stores.

One research firm, Gavekal Dragonomics, calls it “the magical debt-shrinking machine”. When the Chinese government first confronted a mountain of non-performing loans in the state-owned banking sector it came up with a seemingly ingenious solution, the Financial Times reported. Rather than write-off NPLs totalling Rmb1.4tn ($216bn), or almost 20 per cent of gross domestic product in 1999, specially created asset management companies bought them off the country’s “big four” state banks at full face value, paying with government-backed 10-year bonds.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Monday he is confident Greece and its creditors will agree on an assessment of the country’s bailout program, although he cast doubt on whether an agreement could be reached this week, The Wall Street Journal reported. Greece and its creditors—the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund—are in talks on the economic overhauls Athens must implement before the country can receive fresh loans. “We will be successful in the troika’s [bailout] review with Greece,” Mr.

European Union policy makers need to standardize insolvency laws across the bloc if new bank-failure rules are to work effectively, according to Elke Koenig, head of the euro area’s central resolution authority, Bloomberg News reported. “We need to consider that insolvency law is the basis for our work,” Koenig said at a conference in Frankfurt on Monday.

Saudi Arabia unveiled plans to free the kingdom from its dependence on oil revenues, in part by selling a stake in its state-owned oil company and creating the world’s largest sovereign-wealth fund, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move represents an ambitious attempt to lay out a new economic trajectory for the country in an era of cheap oil. It is the brainchild of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 30-year-old son of King Salman, who was entrusted by his father to oversee what are likely to be jarring changes in the kingdom.

South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping Co. Ltd., is seeking to put itself under a creditor-led restructuring after a senior government official said the country’s ailing shipping firms may go into receivership if they can’t rebuild their businesses on their own, The Wall Street Journal reported. Hanjin, the world’s eighth-largest container shipping company by capacity, said in a statement late Friday that it will make an official request to turn its debt-restructuring efforts over to its creditors, led by the Korea Development Bank.

The head of troubled Malaysian state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) said his firm and an Abu Dhabi sovereign fund could face cross defaults on other debts if they fail to make an interest payment by Monday, The Edge Weekly reported. The grace period for a $50 million coupon payment due on a 1MDB bond expires on Monday, and 1MDB says Abu Dhabi's International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) has assumed responsibility for making the payment.

After summoning 100 representatives of Argentina’s business elite to the presidential residence this week, Mauricio Macri praised the few that had recently announced investments. The rest, he implied, were not doing their bit for the country, the Financial Times reported. The centre-right leader has implemented a barrage of economic reforms since taking office in December, including fixing a decade-long creditor dispute that enabled Argentina’s blockbuster return to international capital markets with a $16.5bn debt issue.

Discussions on new debt relief measures for Greece will commence as early as next Thursday, as the eurogroup of finance ministers agreed to endorse a new ‘contingency package’ for Greece, the Irish Times reported.

Europe’s largest investment bank Deutsche Bank has emerged on the list of bidders this week for one of the National Asset Management Agency’s last big portfolio sales, the Irish Times reported. The Frankfurt-based bank joins a joint offer from Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs and CarVal, a US investor in distressed assets, on Nama’s sale of two portfolios which have a combined nominal value of €4.7 billion, according to sources. Others bidders include Lone Star and Cerberus.