Headlines

The Royal Bank of Scotland said Tuesday that its outlook continues to improve as the British lender benefits from further declines in charges for bad loans, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The bank, which is 81 percent owned by the British government, said that it expected to “significantly outperform” its prior guidance for the 2014 fiscal year. The bank had expected to record about 1 billion pounds, or about $1.6 billion, in charges for bad loans this year. It did not provide an updated figure.

Finnish nickel miner Talvivaara lacks the long-term financing it needs to avoid bankruptcy, it said on Tuesday after an administrator proposed an eight-year restructuring plan that includes slashing its debts by up to 99 percent, Reuters reported. Talvivaara listed to great fanfare in London in 2007 when nickel peaked at around $51,000 per tonne. But nickel prices have more than halved, and hurt by repeated production disruptions and environmental damage, the company last year suspended its mining operations and started a court-led debt restructuring process to avoid bankruptcy.

The European Central Bank is considering whether to enact rules that would allow asset-backed securities issued by Greek and Cypriot banks that carry a junk rating to be purchased by the ECB under its new purchase plan, a person familiar with the matter said Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. The ECB is due to release full details of its ABS plan, which was first disclosed on Sept. 4 as part of a package of measures aimed at boosting growth and inflation in the eurozone, at its monthly meeting Thursday.

FlyRomania (X5, Bucharest Otopeni) has filed for insolvency with a Bucharest court. A filing seen by ch-aviation has now called for all creditors to lodge claims with the airline's interim trustee, Dinu Urse Associates, with the deadline for submissions set for October 30. Doubts about the Ten Airways (X5, Bucharest Baneasa) subsidiary's long-term viability first surfaced in June when poor load-factors forced it to dramatically scale down its flights, just one month after it launched operations.

The Lloyds Banking Group said today that it had terminated the contracts of eight individuals and clawed back about £3 million in bonuses after its settlement of inquiries into the manipulation of global benchmark interest rates, the Irish Times reported. In July, Lloyds agreed to pay more than $380 million to British and US authorities to resolve investigations into the manipulation of rates, including one used to determine fees paid by Lloyds related to a £17 billion taxpayer-backed bailout during the financial crisis.

U.K. Treasury chief George Osborne said Monday that the Conservative Party would cut billions of pounds more of public spending to tackle the deficit, part of a tough-on-the-economy message the party hopes will win over voters in the 2015 general election, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Osborne, who made the announcement in a speech to the center-right party's conference, is looking to draw the battle lines with the main opposition Labour Party over the economy ahead of the election in May.

A U.S. judge held Argentina in contempt of court on Monday, saying the republic was trying to find ways to circumvent a prior order requiring it pay holdout bondholders at the same time as other creditors who restructured their debt in recent years, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa in Manhattan deferred a decision on imposing sanctions against Argentina to a later date. But he did say that the "problem is that the republic of Argentina has been and is now taking steps in an attempt to evade critical parts of" his injunction.

After a two-week pilots' strike that inconvenienced nearly a million passengers and caused Air France to lose an estimated 280 million euros, the airline was slowly returning to the skies on Monday, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. It was unclear what the pilots had achieved from the strike, other than to delay severely the return to profitability for the French-Dutch parent company, Air France-KLM, and to curb the company’s ambitions for growth in Europe’s fiercely competitive regional market.

German prosecutors said Monday that they had filed criminal charges against the former chief executive and the former management board of Hypo Real Estate, accusing them of misleading investors in 2008 during what proved to be the country’s most costly bank failure, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. Georg Funke, the former chief executive of the Munich-based lender, and seven former management board members are accused of misleading investors about risks facing the bank ahead of its collapse in September 2008.

A deemster has criticised the island’s ‘archaic and confusing’ insolvency laws, Isle of Man Today reported. Deemster Alan Gough made the comments as he delivered judgment in the case of a company owned by a Nigerian oil tycoon whose high profile divorce case made headlines worldwide.