Headlines

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 largest economies sent a warning Friday to tax havens hiding billions of dollars in potential revenue critical to domestic growth plans around the world, The Wall Street Journal reported. G-20 finance officials called on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to report by July countries and jurisdictions that haven’t signed up to new international standards on tax transparency and information sharing.

A political crisis and a two-year corruption scandal have brought Latin America’s largest economy to its knees. Now the country is looking to the lower house to end the political stalemate. There legislators prepare to vote on Sunday whether to move ahead with an impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff that could end with Vice President Michel Temer taking the reins, Bloomberg News reported. The government is appealing in the Supreme Court to halt the vote.

Royal Bank of Scotland is to close 32 of its NatWest branches and cut 600 jobs in the bailed-out bank’s latest attempt to save costs and respond to customers’ increased use of digital banking, The Guardian reported. The job cuts will be in clerical roles at the bank, which is 73% owned by the taxpayer, including 200 posts in the London area and 400 across the north and the Midlands. The Unite union said it intended to fight any move towards compulsory redundancies by the bank, which was bailed out with £45bn of taxpayer money in 2008 and 2009.

The Bank of England issued its clearest warning yet that a British exit from the European Union would probably hurt the economy and cause sterling to slide, angering pro-Brexit campaigners. The warning comes two days after the International Monetary Fund said the world economy would suffer if Britain voted in its referendum on June 23 to leave the EU. "Such a vote might result in an extended period of uncertainty about the economic outlook, including about the prospects for export growth," the BoE said. "This uncertainty would be likely to push down on demand in the short run ...

Greek home appliance retailer Electroniki shut down its 45 outlets nationwide on Thursday after a court ruled it was bankrupt, becoming the latest casualty of the country's economic slump, Reuters reported. Greek retailers have been hit hard after six years of economic recession, and austerity in return for international bailouts, which have wiped out nearly a third of household disposable income.

It is the most bitter industrial relations dispute Ireland has seen for many years. For the past few weeks, a series of two-day strikes on the Dublin tram system, known as Luas, has left 90,000 commuters walking to work. And there may be worse to come, the Financial Times reported. After an uncompromising exchange this week between Transdev, the French transport company that operates Luas, and the Siptu trade union that represents tram drivers, an all-out strike now threatens to shut the service indefinitely.

German prosecutors said on Thursday they would press criminal charges against the family behind drugstore chain Schlecker, which folded four years ago, Reuters reported. The chain's founder, 71-year-old Anton Schlecker, is accused of having siphoned assets from the company on 36 occasions while in full knowledge of its looming bankruptcy, according to the prosecutors' office in the city of Stuttgart. It did not provide a figure on the sums involved, but a spokesman for the prosecutors said several million euros had been illegally diverted from funds available to repay creditors.

China and India are both grappling with escalating bad debt challenges lurking in their banking systems. Yet the two Asian economic giants are embracing markedly different strategies to clean up the mess, Bloomberg News reported. Impaired loans have reached a decade high in China and are at their most in 14 years in India, posing a threat to two economies that increasingly have fueled global growth. Troubled banking systems hurt economies by curbing new lending for corporate investment.

For the past two months, Brazilian financial markets have staged wild rallies over any sign that left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff might be ousted from office, even as the nation’s economy spiraled further into the depths of its worst crisis in generations, The Wall Street Journal reported. Now, with a crucial impeachment vote looming on Sunday, investors may soon get their wish for new leadership. If two-thirds of lawmakers in Brazil’s lower house vote to try Ms. Rousseff on charges of doctoring the government’s fiscal numbers, she will have to step aside, at least temporarily.

A US appeals court has cleared the way for Argentina to raise as much as $15bn to pay holdout creditors, enabling the Latin American sovereign to re-enter international capital markets after more than a decade on the sidelines, the Financial Times reported. The decision from the US District Court of Appeals in Manhattan affirmed a judge’s ruling to lift an injunction that barred Argentina from paying certain creditors, which subsequently pushed it into default in 2014.