Headlines

Administrators implementing a rescue plan for African Bank Investments'(Abil) furniture business Ellerine have so far failed to find bidders for the bulk of the assets, they told creditors in an update on Friday, Reuters reported on Saturday. Failure to dispose off assets could potentially reduce the amount creditors can expect to receive after the business that owes nearly 1.3 billion rand ($118 million) is wound down fully. Ellerine was forced into a business rescue process -- similar to chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S.

Brazil clawed out of recession in the third quarter on the back of government spending, but the outlook for Latin America’s biggest economy remains clouded by weak investment, wary consumers and rising interest rates, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, expanded 0.1 percent in the third quarter on a seasonally adjusted basis from the previous three months, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, or IBGE, said on Friday.

The property developer Vincent Tchenguiz has filed a $3.5 billion claim in London against the accounting firm Grant Thornton, the Icelandic bank Kaupthing and three individuals, claiming they were behind a flawed criminal inquiry into the bank’s collapse, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The Serious Fraud Office of Britain dropped its inquiry against Mr.

Thousands of workers, students and pensioners marched through central Athens Thursday as part of a 24-hour nationwide general strike called by the country’s two biggest unions to protest against the government’s austerity program, The Wall Street Journal reported. The protesters, who filed through the city’s main square and past parliament, called on the two-party coalition government to end the austerity measures that pushed the economy into a deep recession, shrank output by roughly 30% and left more than a quarter of the workforce without jobs.

Sputnik Engineering, the parent company of Swiss inverter manufacturer Solarmax, will file for insolvency in Switzerland this week PV Tech has learned. In a circular sent to customers and seen by PV Tech, the company said it had looked for alternatives but to no avail. “The employees have been informed this morning and will stop working today until further notice,” it said in the statement. The company is not the first European manufacturer to struggle as the domestic market declined and competition increased.

The first balance sheet of Portugal's Novo Banco, the successor to Banco Espirito Santo following a state rescue in August, will show solvency ratios above the required threshold and no need for additional capital, its chief executive said, Reuters reported. Eduardo Stock da Cunha told reporters on Thursday the bank's deposits were recovering after a drop in the wake of the rescue that split BES into the working Novo Banco and a "bad bank" exposed to liabilities of its founding Espirito Santo family.

OW Tanker, a unit of bankrupt OW Bunker and owner of its marine fuel supply ships, has been taken over by a newly-created company, the fleet manager told Reuters on Wednesday. OW Bunker, the largest ship fuel supplier in the world, collapsed earlier this month after it said it had lost almost $300 million in hedging losses and unauthorised credit lines given in Singapore. Henrik Pedersen said the takeover by Alba Tanker ApS, which has the trustees of the bankrupt company on its board, is part of the process of securing assets for the estate.

The Central Bank of Ireland has proposed a raft of new regulations for credit unions, covering a number of areas including reserves, liquidity, lending, investments, controls, and reporting requirements, the Irish Times reported. The draft regulations are designed to ensure that “appropriate limits and requirements” are in place for the credit union sector. Under the new rules, the maximum amount that somebody can save with a credit union will be limited to €100,000, half the level currently in place.

Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said banks should have more power to recoup money from defaulters to rebalance a system that’s skewed in favor of large companies, Bloomberg News reported. The Indian credit system is unhealthy and rests on an uneven sharing of risks and profits that overprotects big borrowers and forces state-controlled banks to absorb losses in downturns without profiting in good times, Rajan said yesterday.

Greek officials held a fresh round of talks with international inspectors in Paris Tuesday in a bid to jump-start deadlocked talks over Greece’s reform and austerity program as the country fast approached a year-end deadline to hammer out a new financing deal with creditors, The Wall Street Journal reported. The talks with the troika—made up of representatives from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund—have been stuttering since October, hamstringing Greece’s hopes of negotiating an early exit to its current bailout program.