Headlines

A creditor of bankrupt OW Bunker is preparing a lawsuit in Singapore seeking to reclaim its money, court documents showed, as the fallout from the collapse of the world's largest marine fuel supplier begins to ripple through the sector, Reuters reported. In a separate case, court documents showed a second ship fuel company, Vanguard Energy Pte Ltd, filed for bankruptcy in the city state on Oct. 29, a week before OW Bunker said it had been driven to insolvency by suspected fraud at its Singapore trading unit.

Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a decision permitting the family of bankrupt businessman Sean Quinn advance legal claims which could lead to their avoiding liability for €2.34 billion loans, the Irish Times reported. Patricia Quinn and her five children say they had no knowledge of activities surrounding the loans made to Quinn companies by IBRC’s predecessor, Anglo Irish Bank. They claim the loans were illegal because they were used to support the bank’s share price and they cannot therefore be made liable for them.

Irish MEP and former Government minister Brian Hayes said today the Central Bank’s plan to require borrowers to have a 20 per cent deposit to get a home loan was “unfair”, and called for cheaper longer term loans to be introduced.

Brazil’s next finance minister, to be appointed within weeks, must wrestle with a growing government problem: not enough money, The Wall Street Journal reported. Shoring up Brazil’s books is crucial for the nation to avoid a potential credit rating downgrade, which would increase its costs of borrowing. But there are short-term economic pitfalls as well as political challenges for President Dilma Rousseff , who faces a more conservative and divided Congress than she did in her first term. Among her first tasks is avoiding Brazil’s version of the fiscal cliff.

Sweden’s financial watchdog is proposing tighter rules for people taking out new mortgages as the country seeks to manage rising levels of household debt, The Wall Street Journal reported. Finansinspektionen, the Swedish financial supervisory authority also known as FI, said Tuesday it plans to make it mandatory for those taking out mortgages over 50% of the value of a property to pay the mortgage down over a period of time. Those whose mortgage is over 70% of the value of the property will be expected to pay the loan down by 2% a year until it falls to 70%, FI said.

A panel set up by the Union finance ministry to help frame a bankruptcy code will submit its suggestions on insolvency in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by the budget session of Parliament, followed by its report covering the larger corporate sector later next year, Livemint reported. The government is hoping that a bankruptcy framework, along with the various steps taken in the last few months, will improve the country’s ranking in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report. India is currently at the 142nd rank out of 189 countries.

Dubai's Limitless will pledge its future revenues to service debt repayments as it attempts a second restructuring of a $1.2 billion Islamic loan which banking sources said should be completed ahead of a December deadline, Reuters reported. The state-owned property firm is on track to restructure the debt by the end of the year, when a payment worth a third of the total comes due, two sources familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

Seven years after the global financial crisis started, Canada’s banks remain selective in what they disclose – a problem illustrated by Ottawa’s recent crackdown on credit-card transaction fees, The Globe and Mail reported. Despite being one of the banking sector’s most widely discussed issues, with lenders lobbying Ottawa furiously out of fear that any ruling would be too harsh, the average investor had almost no way of calculating how many millions or billions of dollars were at stake.

European financial institutions have nearly doubled volumes of riskier debt deals as yield-starved investors are prepared to snap up racier assets in their struggle to generate a return, the Financial Times reported. Issuance of subordinated debt – which would suffer losses during a default before senior debt in a bank’s capital hierarchy – have risen by 80 per cent year on year to $122.4bn so far in 2014 according to Dealogic, the data provider. The year-to-date total is the highest since 2007, before the global financial crisis.

To reunite Germany, the West German government would set in motion the beginnings of a massive transfusion of financial and social subsidies and within a year make whole a country divided for some 40 years, The Wall Street Journal reported. It required restructuring Europe’s postwar political order to allow for the annexation of a bankrupt state and a collapsing economy, an audacious undertaking that left economists wondering if it could even be done.