Headlines

China's Fosun International Ltd has upped its bid for Portugal's Espirito Santo Saude (ESS) to 4.82 euros a share or 460.5 million euros ($584 million) in total, stepping up the battle over the hospital business of the indebted Espirito Santo family, Reuters reported. Portugal's CMVM market regulator said late on Friday it registered the all-cash offer by conglomerate Fosun's Portuguese insurance unit Fidelidade, while also extending by a week to Oct. 10 a rival offer by Mexico's Grupo Angeles, the first to bid for ESS. Angeles initially offered 4.3 euros a share for the company on Aug.

Weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin annexed Crimea in March, an obscure regulatory board in Moscow known as the Market Council convened inside an office tower not far from the Kremlin to discuss the country’s wholesale electricity market. It is a colossal business, worth 2 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product, and a rich source of fees for the bank that had long held the exclusive right to service it.

When in 2011, Maria Cristina Erasmus wanted to fix up her house, the 63-year-old retiree took out a bank loan of 50,000 South African rand ($4,465). When she wanted to buy furniture, she borrowed more, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mrs. Erasmus and her taxi-driver husband offered no collateral but agreed to pay 30% annual interest—about four times the country's average lending rate. Now, she can't repay the 100,000 rand that is owed. "We moved to a cheaper house, but we couldn't do it," Mrs. Erasmus said.

Shareholders of Dubai's Amlak Finance met for the first time in more than six years on Sunday and backed a key component of the mortgage provider's $2.7 billion debt restructuring deal, Reuters reported. Amlak's future has been in the balance for years. Its shares have not traded since November 2008 when they were suspended in the wake of the global financial crisis and a local real estate crash, and a number of attempts to revive the firm since then have failed.

China is likely to delay its financial reform agenda in favour of stabilising growth, economists and investors say, in a move that could hinder efforts to correct distortions in the economy, the Financial Times reported. Deregulation of interest rates was a key plank in the ambitious reform agenda that top Communist party leaders approved last November, which promised to give market forces a “decisive” role in capital allocation.

New amendments to the Latvian insolvency legislation allowing struggling mortgage holders to mail their home keys to their lenders to get rid of their loan obligations have seriously upset banks, Latvia's Dienas Bizness daily reported on Thursday. The Association of Latvian Commercial Banks is determined to appeal to Latvian President Andris Berzins not to promulgate the amendments and to send them back to the parliament for revision, the banking association's spokeswoman Baiba Melnace told BNS.

The European Union's banking watchdog is investigating a possible breach of the bloc's deposit-guarantee law at Bulgaria's Corporate Commercial Bank, three months after the lender suspended client payments and the central bank put it under special supervision following a bank run, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Despite bowing to an important union demand, Air France-KLM remained crippled on Thursday by an 11-day-old pilots’ strike, the International New York Times reported.

A Chinese probe into trade financing found nearly $10 billion in fake deals, a senior official said, in the latest warning over practices that raised concern over potential losses among foreign and Chinese banks this year. The Wall Street Journal reported.

The British government announced on Thursday it would increase its oversight of a broad array of financial benchmarks in the foreign exchange, fixed income and commodity markets, including making it a criminal offense for traders to manipulate them, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported.