Headlines

On May 1 — Labour Day — one of President Robert Mugabe’s top officials took to Twitter to offer a bleak assessment for Zimbabwe’s economy, the Financial Times reported. In unusually frank comments, Jonathan Moyo, information minister, tweeted: “This May Day our triple challenge is we’ve workers without work, we’ve lost the sense of labour value & we lack a strategy to create wealth!” Mr Mugabe’s government typically talks up Zimbabwe’s economy.

Ukraine’s parliament passed a bill Tuesday allowing the government to halt payments on some foreign debts, raising the stakes as a deadline looms in rescheduling talks with international creditors, The Wall Street Journal reported. The measure, approved in a 246-4 vote hours after it was first proposed, comes amid tough talks with creditors over restructuring debts, a key measure demanded by the International Monetary Fund as part of a $17.5-billion lending program. The bill requires the signature of President Petro Poroshenko to take effect.

Leaders of the hard-left faction of Greece’s Syriza party have called for a “rupture” with creditors in a public challenge to Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, as he moves closer to a new bailout deal, the Financial Times reported. The rebels include five members of Syriza’s political bureau and Central Committee led by John Milios, a former shadow finance minister.

In a related story, the International New York Times reported that Greece, having endured five years of economic austerity, is now reeling from a different condition: economic uncertainty. No one knows if Greece’s government, led by the radical left Syriza party, will strike a new deal with European creditors — or if the country will default on its debts, setting off a new crisis. Even if a deal is cut, no one knows what it will look like, whether the Greek Parliament will pass it, or whether a deal will bring a new iteration of austerity and hardship for ordinary Greeks.

Serbia and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation agreed a programme on Monday to improve bankruptcy legislation and out of court settlements, in order to bring down the high level of non-performing loans, Reuters reported. Bad loans account for 23 percent of all lending in Serbia, a European Union candidate country where foreign banks control 75 percent of the market. So far, four Serbian banks have collapsed under the weight of bad loans, at a cost of 800 million euros to the state.

Three-quarters of the world’s workers are temporary, casual or self-employed and this sort of employment is likely to become more prevalent, says the International Labour Organisation. The ILO, a UN agency that specialises in work, analysed employment patterns in 180 countries and found that the “standard” model of permanent full-time employment was “less and less dominant” in rich, developed economies, the Financial Times reported. In developing economies, salaried employment was still growing as a share of the total workforce but that historical trend appeared to be slowing.

Lloyds Banking Group is planning to sell €4.2 billion of face value legacy loans connected with Ireland in what will be one of the biggest such real estate portfolio sales here since the financial crash in late 2008, the Irish Times reported. Dubbed Project Poseidon, the disposal covers the vast bulk of what remains from Bank of Scotland’s former operations in Ireland. It has been brought to market by Deloitte with first bids due to be lodged in early June.

Former UK employees of Nortel Networks, the insolvent Canadian telecoms firm, could receive up to two thirds of their long-deferred pension claims after the US and Canadian courts ruled that the company’s remaining assets should be equally divided among all the insolvent parts of the group. Accountancy firm PwC, a financial adviser to the trustees of the Nortel UK Pension Scheme since the company’s 2009 insolvency, said that the unprecedented joint ruling by the courts could set an example in future insolvency cases involving highly integrated multinational companies.

As China's economy slows and Beijing becomes more relaxed about letting its companies fail, a rising number of foreign bondholders risk being caught up in the country's unpredictable court system, Reuters reported. Last month, solar producer Baoding Tianwei Baobian Electric became China's first ever state-owned company to default on a bond coupon payment, showing Beijing's increasing willingness to let companies go bust in a bid to reform its corporate market. Also in April, Kaisa Group became the first Chinese property developer to fail to pay a coupon on its U.S.

German politicians kept up the pressure on Greece over the weekend to implement reforms, with Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel warning Athens in an interview that a third aid package would not be on the cards unless the Greeks made some changes. Greece is fast running out of cash and talks with its lenders have been deadlocked over their demands for Greece to implement reforms, including pension cuts and labor market liberalization.