Headlines

Singapore-listed oil and gas company Linc Energy Ltd owes creditors A$289.4 million ($210.28 million) and should be wound up, according to its administrators. The company entered into voluntary administration a month ago, suffering from debt woes amid a slump in energy prices. Administrators PPB Advisory released a report on Friday recommending the company be liquidated. "We recommend that it is in the creditors' interests that the company be wound up," the report said.

The Bank of England said Thursday that a vote to leave the European Union could slam the brakes on growth in the U.K., push up unemployment and stoke inflation, in its clearest warning yet about the potential economic costs surrounding a referendum on membership next month, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The foreign companies that hold more than 100,000 UK properties will have to reveal their true owners under a transparency proposal announced by David Cameron. The step was greeted by transparency campaigners as “a great move” and was aimed at energising an international summit on corruption being hosted by the prime minister on Thursday, the Financial Times reported. Mr Cameron pledged last year to stem the “dirty money” and “plundered or laundered cash” flowing into British properties, more than £120bn of which are owned by offshore companies.

India’s Parliament has passed a bankruptcy law that promises to make it easier to wind up a failing business and recover debts in Asia’s third-largest economy, The Wall Street Journal The Short Answer blog reported. The country’s banks are currently struggling with bad loans after the crash in commodity prices and slowdown in infrastructure projects affected corporates’ balance sheets and their capacity to settle debt.

In Europe’s battle with the International Monetary Fund over Greece, Germany has a way to win, The Wall Street Journal reported. Germany, Europe’s dominant economic power, is leaning heavily on the IMF to accept hypothetical assurances that Greece’s debt burden will be addressed in the future if needed, rather than the definite and far-reaching debt relief that the IMF wanted, according to people familiar with the talks. Berlin believes the IMF will have to accept what’s on offer, even if IMF staff are unhappy about it, these people say.

Irish oil producer Petroceltic International Plc said a court examiner had selected its largest shareholder, Worldview Capital Management, to take control of the group. Petroceltic, which received a 3 pence per share offer from Worldview in February, said it expected to sign an investment agreement over the coming days which would result in Worldview owning the company, Reuters reported. The company was placed in examinership in March, a process under Irish law that is akin to Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States and administration in Britain.

An interim examiner has been appointed by the High Court to the department store chain, Debenhams Retail (Ireland) Ltd, which operates 11 stores in the Republic, the Irish Times reported. The move affects the jobs of 2,265 people, of whom 1,415 are directly employed by the business. Some 500 staff people work in concessions within Debenhams stores, with a further 320 are employed in cosmetics.

Greece is invariably held up as Exhibit One in the case against the European Union. Its six-year debt crisis—now threatening to reignite right before a British referendum on EU membership—is often presented as proof that the EU is an anti-democratic, sovereignty-destroying, austerity-loving bully. But this narrative is wide of the mark, The Wall Street Journal reported in a commentary.

As fire ripped through Fort McMurray, oil companies severely pulled back or stopped pumping altogether. Production dropped by a million barrels a day, roughly 40 percent of Alberta’s output, the International New York Times reported. While the oil markets have remained relatively stable and production is slowly picking up, the economic blow is significant to a region and a country already battered by weak oil prices and uncertainty over global growth. Oil companies could take weeks or months to get fully up and running, depriving the province of Alberta of royalty payments.

Smaller corporate lenders are better positioned to weather Brazil's worst recession in decades, but need to be monitored closely as clients grapple with soaring defaults and bankruptcy filings, the head of the nation's deposit guarantee fund said. Banks in the so-called middle-market segment have tightened loan disbursement standards and scaled down the use of borrowed money to boost lending, although they are struggling to predict defaults, which recently hit a six-year high.