Headlines

Stonepeak Partners entered into an agreement to invest in AA Ltd., the breakdown coverage firm said in a statement, Bloomberg News reported. The alternative investment firm will become a minority shareholder of AA, according to the statement Saturday. AA didn’t disclose the size of the investment. Sky News earlier reported Stonepeak was nearing a £450 million ($572 million) investment into AA, which is owned by private equity firms TowerBrook and Warburg Pincus.

India's finance ministry has asked managing directors of public sector banks to review monthly the top 20 insolvency cases, financial services secretary told reporters, Reuters reported. The government has asked for reviews of insolvency cases as there are delays in admission of cases in insolvency courts. "There are delays in admission stage,” Vivek Joshi, Vivek Joshi, said.

The bankruptcy court in Kolkata has approved the acquisition of Khaitan family-promoted listed engineering firm McNally Bharat Engineering Co by BTL EPC Ltd, the Economic Times of India reported. McNally Bharat had admitted liabilities of Rs5,015 crore. The lenders have approved the Kolkata-based EPC firm’s over Rs 441-croreresolution plan with 90.06% votes in favour. Originally, the Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal had admitted the company under the corporate insolvency resolution process (CIRP) in 2020 following an application filed by its lender, Bank of India.

Hovding AB, a Swedish company that has made headlines for the first mass-market bicycle airbag helmet, filed for bankruptcy on Thursday after regulators stopped the sales of its main product, Bloomberg News reported. The decision comes after the Swedish Consumer Agency forced a complete halt of all sales of the Hovding 3 helmet on Dec. 15, due to concerns that it wouldn’t inflate properly on impact.

China’s biggest banks are lowering the deposit rates offered to savers, a move that could pave the way for the central bank to make interest-rate cuts to spur economic growth, the Wall Street Journal reported. Five state-owned lenders and joint-stock bank China Merchants Bank said the rate cuts took effect on Friday. The five were Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China and Bank of Communications.

Egypt held interest rates after inflation kept slowing from a record while the government eyes an expanded International Monetary Fund loan and speculation swirls over the timing of a much-awaited currency devaluation, Bloomberg News reported. The central bank left the deposit rate at 19.25% and the lending rate at 20.25%, its Monetary Policy Committee said Thursday. Nine of 13 economists surveyed by Bloomberg correctly predicted the decision, which maintains the benchmark at its highest level in data that stretches back to 2006.

Japan's finance minister on Friday said he would strive to contain the risk of runaway debt after unveiling an annual budget as speculation mounts the central bank will shift away from more than two decades of ultra-easy monetary policy, Reuters reported. The world's third-largest economy is under pressure to restore its fiscal health after prolonged stimulus and spending worsened a national debt that is the heaviest in the industrialised world.

Japan’s labor market remained relatively tight in November, keeping pressure on employers to boost pay in order to fill positions as companies prepare to engage in annual wage negotiations with unions, Bloomberg News reported. The job-to-applicants ratio eased a tad to 1.28, meaning there were 128 jobs offered for every 100 applicants, the labor ministry reported Tuesday. Economists had forecast the reading would be unchanged at 1.30. A separate report from the ministry of internal affairs showed the unemployment rate held steady at 2.5% in November.

Canadian retail spending flattened heading into the holiday season, an indication consumers may be hesitating in an environment of high interest rates and with signs showing the broader economy is struggling, the Wall Street Journal reported. Retail sales were relatively unchanged last month, according to an advance estimate of receipts released Thursday by Statistics Canada. That comes after sales in October rose 0.7% to a seasonally adjusted 66.95 billion Canadian dollars, the equivalent of about $50.08 billion, the data agency said.

The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office must pay Eurasian Natural Resources Corp. after it began a corruption investigation based on tips improperly obtained from a senior lawyer for the company, a U.K. court said. The SFO committed a “serious breach” of its own duties by privately communicating with a lawyer then at Dechert, a law firm hired by the company to run an internal investigation into possible bribery, Justice David Waksman of the High Court in London said Thursday in a written judgment. Without those communications, the agency wouldn’t have launched its investigation, Waksman found.