Headlines

A company which transformed a rooftop parkade into a mass-producing vegetable greenhouse — and touted by Mayor Gregor Robertson as an example of Vancouver’s “booming clean tech sector” — has filed for bankruptcy and owes its creditors more than $4 million, the Vancouver Courier reported. Bankruptcy records show Alterrus Systems Inc. and its subsidiary Local Garden Vancouver Inc. declared bankruptcy Jan. 21 after less than two years of operation at 535 Richards St.

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc set aside a further 3.1 billion pounds ($5.1 billion) to cover legal and compensation claims, putting Britain’s biggest bailed-out lender on track to post its largest pretax loss since 2008, Bloomberg News reported. The provision includes 1.9 billion pounds for lawsuits and fines tied mostly to the sale of $91 billion of mortgage-backed securities from 2005 to 2007, according to the lender. It follows agreements Deutsche Bank AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and UBS AG struck with U.S.

Turkey's central bank—beset by political instability, tumbling confidence and one of the world's fastest falling currencies—said that it will convene an emergency meeting Tuesday, a move that could test whether once-golden emerging markets can avert a destabilizing crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. Central bankers in many emerging-market countries are under intense political pressure to keep interest rates low to keep economic growth on track, despite the inflationary effects.

Three junior holders and a committee representing senior bondholders of Punch Taverns' securitised debt said on Monday morning they would reject a proposed restructuring at an investor meeting scheduled to take place on February 14, Reuters reported. In its restructuring proposal launched on January 15, the company threatened to default if investors fail to agree to the terms put forward that would cut debt from GBP2.3bn to GBP1.83bn and net leverage from 11 to 8.7 times Ebitda.

Since the insolvency of metallurgical company Liepajas metalurgs was declared this past November, EUR 1.3 million has already been spent in maintaining the company and its equipment, the company's insolvency administrator Haralds Velmers said, The Baltic Course reported. Velmers points out that most of the money went to paying electricity and gas bills, as well as paying salaries for essential personnel. ''Up until a few days ago, we were quite happy with the situation, as we were able to save a bit on our heating bill due to the unseasonably warm weather,'' he said.

Insolvency petition filings in the Cayman Islands spiked more than 30 per cent in 2013 when compared with 2012, resulting in the highest number of filings in the past three years, according to Appleby, Hedgeweek reported. The increase reversed a downward trend in the number of petitions filed in 2011 and 2012 that had followed high numbers in 2009 and 2010 driven by the global financial crisis, according to the firm’s Snapshot report on petition filings in the Cayman Islands going back to 2008.

The International Monetary Fund has cleared Uganda to increase its debt ceiling on non-concessional borrowing by up to 47%, to allow the East African nation to fund ambitious hydroelectric projects aimed at addressing chronic power shortages, The Wall Street Journal reported. The country's borrowing limit has been increased to $2.2 billion from $1.5 billion, a boost for the country's efforts to access funds to meet its widening budget deficit, Ana Lucia Coronel, the IMF's senior resident representative in Uganda, said Monday.

State-owned investment firm Dubai Group announced its long-awaited $10 billion debt restructuring deal with creditors late on Thursday. While all bankers and advisors who took part in the often acrimonious negotiations breathed a sigh of relief, most of them are also aware that Dubai’s debt problems aren’t quite a thing of the past yet, The Wall Street Journal Middle East Real Time blog reported.

Russian state lender Sberbank is negotiating with loss-making aluminium group Rusal on a debt restructuring deal to help the company weather low aluminium prices, two banking sources told Reuters on Friday. United Company Rusal, the world's biggest producer of the metal used in transport and packaging, has been hit by weak aluminium prices and its heavy net debt levels of around $10 billion. "The model has been broadly agreed... We cannot afford the world's largest producer to fail," one of the sources said. Rusal declined to comment. Sberbank could not be reached for immediate comment.

Mario Draghi has signalled that he would be prepared for the European Central Bank to fight deflation in Europe by buying packages of bank loans to households and companies, the Financial Times reported. Such a move would mark a sharp departure from traditional quantitative easing and provide a potential fix to the collapse in bank lending in the currency bloc.