Headlines

President Vladimir Putin is trying to transform Crimea into the Singapore of the Black Sea. That effort so far has cost Russia’s newest republic its entire banking system and all three of its McDonald’s, Bloomberg News reported. After Putin annexed Crimea in March, the government in Kiev banned all lenders operating under Ukrainian law from the region. Now almost every bank on the peninsula, from billionaire Igor Kolomoisky’s Privatbank, Ukraine’s largest, to Italy’s UniCredit SpA (UCG) has been shuttered.

Automotive industry supplier Cimos, one of the biggest companies in Slovenia, will undergo court-supervised debt restructuring after the major creditors decided against a debt-to-equity conversion by the Thursday deadline, the Slovenian news agency STA reported.

China will allow local governments to sell bonds for the first time in two decades in a big step towards tackling a looming crisis in public finances and reining in the shadow banking sector that municipal authorities rely on for funding, the Financial Times reported. China’s finance ministry said 10 local governments in mostly wealthy and well-managed provinces and cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, would be included in a pilot scheme to sell bonds on their own.

Telus Corp. has served notice that it’s dropping a $350-million takeover bid for Mobilicity, ending a drawn-out effort to scoop up the struggling small player and its valuable wireless spectrum, The Globe and Mail reported. This turn of events leaves Mobilicity, now in bankruptcy protection, without a solid bidder to take over its business, recent reports from its bankruptcy monitor would suggest. It also leaves bondholders, who are owed hundreds of millions of dollars, at risk of significant losses.

The clouds of the global financial crisis may have lifted, but six years later, the world economy is not creating nearly as many jobs as it was before 2008, a United Nations report on Wednesday concluded, nor is it expected to in the near term. That is a particularly worrisome fact at a time when more young people are entering the job market than ever before, the International New York Times reported. The economies of developed countries are likely to grow at 2 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2015, a faster clip than in the two previous years, the report said.

Pre-tax losses at ACC Bank increased to €310 million last year, up from €213 million in 2012. The increase in losses reflected additional impairments on assets especially in respect of property related exposures, the Irish Times reported. In its final annual results as a licensed bank, the bank said total loans and advances to customers at year end amounted to €2.6 billion, in comparison to the €2.8 billion at the end of 2012. In October, ACC announced plans to withdraw from providing standard banking products, such as current accounts, to focus solely on debt recovery.

China will increasingly manage its troubled property sector locally, as the nation seeks to avoid causing either an abrupt slowdown that undermines the economy or another surge in prices, according to government economists involved in policy discussions, the International New York Times reported. After increasing at double-digit rates through most of last year, home prices started easing in late 2013 as a sustained campaign to clamp down on speculative investment and easy credit gained traction.

The prospect of negative interest rates is looking increasingly more likely in Europe amid speculation that the European Central Bank is looking at making the historic move in the hope of attracting more people to take out loans and prevent another credit crunch, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. According to German news magazine SPIEGEL, the ECB is expected to recommend that the bank cut its main refinancing rate from the current 0.25 per cent to a record low of 0.15 per cent when the bank's Governing Council meets in the first week of June.

As Turkish interest rates spike and the economy slows, local bankers and real estate experts are becoming increasingly worried that Istanbul’s real estate market may be heading for a fall, the International New York Times reported. And they are reminded of similarities between the situation here and what happened in Spain and Ireland, where alliances among banks, developers and politicians contributed to the creation of real estate bubbles that popped once interest rates began to rise, puncturing the overall economies as well.

The Israeli state is set to lose control of container carrier ZIM who says it has finalised a $3 billion financial restructuring plan with creditors that includes a $1.4 billion debt-to-shares swap, Ship & Bunker reported. The deal, which is still subject to a range of approvals, includes a promise from state holding company Israel Corp.