Headlines

Bankrupt consumer electronics retailer Dick Smith Holdings Ltd will close down its remaining 363 stores in Australia and New Zealand after failing to find a buyer, receivers and managers of the company said on Thursday, Reuters reported. "Unfortunately the sale process has not resulted in any acceptable offers for the group as a whole or for Australia or New Zealand as standalone businesses," receiver James Stewart said in a statement.

City brokers and smaller banks are on course to win a reprieve from EU rules on bonuses that regulators and the industry have warned could saddle companies with unnecessary administrative costs, the Financial Times reported. Věra Jourová, the member of the European Commission in charge of the pay rules, has concluded that new bonus rules will either have to be applied more flexibly or redrafted, according to people briefed on the matter. The reassessment arose from a bureaucratic bungle, those people said.

Belfast’s key development sites are now “free from the burden of Nama debt” and the city is once again attracting interest from developers and investors, according to the chief executive of the city council, the Irish Times reported. Suzanne Wylie today launched a new Belfast City Council initiative which aims to attract £1 billion (€1.3bn) of new development investment for Belfast, which she believes will then help to deliver “tens of thousands of jobs”.

In 2013 GSO, a hedge fund backed by the private equity group Blackstone, made a loan to a Spanish gambling company. The terms of the loan were designed so that whatever happened, GSO would make a profit on credit derivatives it had bought as insurance against a debt default by the company, the Financial Times reported. Now GSO is accusing a rival of adopting a similar strategy in a battle over the debt of Norske Skog, a distressed Norwegian paper company.

South Korea’s household debt rose to a record Won1,200tn ($973bn) at the end of last year, worsening one of the country’s biggest vulnerabilities even as the government strives to put the national mortgage stock on a more stable basis, the Financial Times reported. The country’s household debt stands at more than 160 per cent of household incomes, having risen steadily for more than three decades, and is seen as one of the economy’s weakest points.

Twenty years ago, a dangerous cocktail of debt accumulated in foreign money and deteriorating exchange rates led emerging markets into financial meltdown, the Financial Times reported. In the aftermath, countries vowed to repent of the “original sin” of borrowing huge sums in non-domestic currencies. Major emerging markets went from having more than three-quarters of their debt in foreign currencies to around half. Finance ministers were applauded for better protecting economies from swings in global market sentiment.

To understand why Europe is having if not another banking crisis then at least a serious banking wobble, you need look no further than Bankia. The Spanish lender came to symbolise everything that went wrong in Spain during the crisis. And it is doing the same again in 2016, the Financial Times reported. Bankia was the highest-profile casualty of Spain’s property market collapse and subsequent meltdown in the banking sector.

European regulators provided details on Wednesday for the latest stress test aimed at measuring the ability of the region’s lenders to survive a financial crisis or severe economic downturn, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. Unlike tests in past years, the latest test will not have a minimum capital threshold that lenders will have to meet in order to pass. As a result, no bank can actually fail — or pass — the examination, according to the European Banking Authority, which regulates lenders in the European Union.

A Malaysian regulatory body Wednesday recommended the nation’s antigraft agency push ahead with a probe into transfers of millions of dollars into Prime Minister Najib Razak’s bank accounts, despite a decision by the nation’s chief prosecutor last month to clear him of wrongdoing, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, an independent agency, had asked the nation’s attorney general to file criminal charges against Mr.

The failure of a Government funded events company that collapsed in 2007 with debts totalling £1.6 million represents “one of the biggest scandals” ever investigated by the North’s Public Accounts Committee, its chairperson declared Wednesday, the Irish Times reported. Sinn Fein’s Michaela Boyle said the level of scandal involved in the collapse of the now defunct Northern Ireland Events Company (NIEC) was “completely shocking” and had ultimately resulted in taxpayers in the North footing a £1.6 million bill.