Headlines

Abengoa SA is stepping up efforts to win creditor support for a debt-restructuring plan two weeks ahead of a court deadline that could lead to insolvency, Bloomberg News reported. The Spanish renewable-energy company still needs the support of lenders with about 35 percent of its debt to approve a deal agreed with its main bank creditors and bondholders last week, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private.

An attempt by the Austrian province of Carinthia to avert the threat of insolvency has failed as too few creditors accepted its offer to buy back a failed bank's bonds at a discount, a person with knowledge of the total said on Friday. Carinthia guaranteed local bank Hypo Alpe Adria's bonds before the lender collapsed and the so-called bad bank Heta Asset Resolution was formed to wind it down. The province wants to repurchase the bonds at a discount to their face value of 10.8 billion euros ($12.1 billion) to avoid having to honour those guarantees, which it says it cannot afford.

China is exploring a new way to grapple with its mounting pile of bad corporate debt, though its top central banker sought on Saturday to dispel worries that the plan would simply shift the burden to other parts of the country’s vast economy, the International New York Times reported. Under the tentative proposal, Chinese officials would allow banks saddled with growing quantities of bad loans to sell that debt to investors, said Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank of China.

A television reporter and cameraman with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. were briefly detained in Malaysia after attempting to interview Prime Minister Najib Razak while he campaigned ahead of a coming state election in the Borneo state of Sarawak, The Wall Street Journal reported. On assignment for the weekly current-affairs program Four Corners, reporter Linton Besser and cameraman Louie Eroglu were detained in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, late Saturday and released Sunday morning, the ABC reported.

Factories and retailers in China put in weaker-than-expected performances in the first two months of the year, as anemic demand and excess capacity continued to bear down on the world’s second-largest economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Industrial production grew 5.4% in January and February compared with a year earlier, down from December’s 5.9% pace, according to government data released Saturday, and just below the 5.6% forecast by economists polled by The Wall Street Journal.

Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer said on Sunday his nickel refinery in Queensland will be idle for at least eight weeks, due to a lack of ore and because government authorities have not yet fully approved its operation, Reuters reported. Speaking on Australian Broadcasting Corporation television, Palmer said the refinery is offline because there is "no ore" for it to process. "It will take at least eight weeks to get ore on the ground so the refinery could operate," Palmer said.

U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne started the week of his eighth budget by warning that he must set out more austerity measures as economic conditions remain difficult, Bloomberg News reported. "My message in this budget is that the world is a more uncertain place than at any time since the financial crisis," Osborne told the BBC’s "Andrew Marr Show” on Sunday. "We’re going to have to make further savings." Osborne has indicated some savings in the budget to be unveiled Wednesday will come from further public-sector spending cuts.

An Italian banking merger that executives see as a crucial step for cleaning up the sector is teetering on the brink of collapse amid a struggle to win approval from the European Central Bank, the Financial Times reported. Senior financiers are warning that the proposed merger between the mutual banks Banca Popolare di Milano and Banco Popolare will fall apart if it fails to secure approval from Frankfurt regulators by next month.

Debt-laden engineer Abengoa said on Thursday it had agreed a draft rescue plan with creditors to cut debt and inject fresh cash, in the latest attempt to avoid what could be Spain's biggest bankruptcy. Loss-making Abengoa, which started out 70 years ago as an engineering business in Seville and expanded into clean energy by taking on huge debts, entered pre-insolvency proceedings last year when lenders refused to extend credit lines.

Mozambique has proposed a restructuring of the contentious state-backed “tuna” bond that has become a byword for the risks associated with lending foreign currency to developing economies. The bond was sold as a plan to create a national fishing industry for the southern African country via Ematum — a tuna-fishing company backed by the state, the Financial Times reported. However, the majority of the money was spent on security operations associated with the loan.