Headlines

At a ceremony imbued with quiet triumph at the Great Hall of the People, China’s president, Xi Jinping, hosted 56 member countries on Monday for the founding of a Chinese-led infrastructure bank for Asia, including major American allies from Asia and Europe that Washington had counseled not to join the bank, the International New York Times reported.

A judge has approved the distribution of funds in Mobilicity’s restructuring proceedings after the small wireless carrier struck a $465-million deal to sell itself to Rogers Communications Inc., The Globe and Mail reported. The court’s order Monday was necessary for the companies to proceed on closing the deal, which they announced last week and which already has approval from the federal government and faces no opposition from the Competition Bureau.

The receivers for Doug Somers-Edgar's Orange Finance have concluded their work with a shortfall of about $10 million in principal and interest owed to debenture holders of the failed company, Scoop.co.nz reported. Orange froze repayments to some 2,500 investors owed $25.6 million in late 2008 before convincing debenture holders to agree to a moratorium on redemptions and interest payments until the end of July 2011. That deadline was later pushed out another year with trustee Covenant Trustee's approval.

Greece will keep its banks closed on Monday in a bid to prevent its banking system from collapsing, a bank official said, after the European Central Bank moved to cap the amount of emergency loans it provides for the country’s cash-strapped lenders, The Wall Street Journal reported. The ECB said earlier on Sunday that it wouldn’t increase the lifeline of emergency liquidity that has been sustaining Greece’s banks, even as nervous Greek depositors appeared to withdraw their money at a greater pace over the weekend.

European Central Bank policy setters are considering keeping Emergency Liquidity Assistance open to Greek banks on Monday but imposing a higher valuation discount on the security they offer in return for the funding, people familiar with the matter said, Reuters reported. If the haircut on the assets Greek banks give for Emergency Liquidity Assistance is increased, it would, however, curb their use of such finance.

As it turns out, the Greek crisis ends not with a bang, but with a referendum, the International New York Times reported in a commentary. It has been easy to ignore the doings in Greece for the last few years, with the perpetual series of summits in Brussels that never seem to resolve anything. But it’s time to pay attention. These next few days are shaping up to become a transformational moment in the 60-year project of building a unified Europe. We just don’t yet know what sort of transformation it will be.

After more than a week of a brutal selloff in Chinese stocks, the country’s central bank on Saturday took a rare easing step, cutting both its benchmark interest rates and the amount of reserves certain banks are required to hold, The Wall Street Journal reported. In a statement, the People’s Bank of China said both steps were aimed at lowering borrowing costs and “stabilizing growth” in the world’s second-largest economy. The PBOC cut its one-year benchmark lending rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.85% and its one-year deposit rate by the same scale to 2%.

Just more than €1 billion of taxable income was sheltered from tax through the use of various property reliefs, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has confirmed, the Irish Times reported. In a written reply to Fianna Fáil’s finance spokesman, Michael McGrath, Mr Noonan said the figure totalled €574 million in 2012 and €450 million provisionally in 2013. Figures for last year are not yet available.

Bank creditors to Drydocks World (DDW), Dubai’s maritime engineering business, are expecting to receive proposals from the government-owned company to restructure some of the US$2.3 billion debt it refinanced in 2012, The National reported. Recent talks with creditors have left them convinced that the company, owned by the Dubai World conglomerate, will seek to change the terms of its agreement to repay some $800 million of bank loans in the summer of 2017.

European finance chiefs pushed off talks to seal a Greek bailout deal until the weekend after ending another meeting without agreement, leaving only days to keep Athens from defaulting on a loan payment early next week, The Wall Street Journal reported. The ministers from Greece and the other 18 eurozone countries cut short a crisis meeting in Brussels on Thursday to give negotiators from the Greek government and its creditors more time to bridge differences on budget cuts and other terms necessary to unlock more aid for Athens. Time is running out to resolve the standoff.