Headlines

Police in Sao Paulo said on Monday they had arrested the former head of bankrupt Brazilian lender Banco Cruzeiro do Sul on charges of money laundering and crimes against the country's financial system and capital markets, Reuters reported. Last month Brazil's central bank ordered the liquidation of the bank and its subsidiary, Banco Prosper, after seizing the lender on June 4 due to fraud-related losses and after administrators failed to find firm takeover bids. The liquidation of the bank represents one of the biggest collapses in the country's banking system in years.

The Ontario government is considerably downsizing a proposed super pension fund that would manage the retirement savings of public-sector workers, The Globe and Mail reported. The government was planning to create a pooled fund to manage the pension plans for employees in community colleges, many universities and the province's largest public sector union. But under a new accord with the government, two of the pension plans have been exempted from becoming part of the proposed fund.

One of the hottest trades of the past few months has been the bonds of a country so shaken by economic and social turmoil that a neo-Nazi party is running third in the polls, The Wall Street Journal reported. That's right: Hedge funds have been buying Greece. Ever since Greece completed a debt restructuring in March that turned €200 billion in bonds into about €60 billion, distressed-debt investors—many at U.S. hedge funds—have been picking them over. Hedge-fund analysts have flooded Greek finance officials with requests for information. Prices have climbed.

The 40,000-person town of Sciacca has become a mausoleum of decades-old unfinished public works. Rainwater and weeds fill the basins of two indoor Olympic-scale swimming pools that have never opened, The Wall Street Journal reported. The cement carcass of a retirement home, overlooking Sciacca's port, remains bereft of tenants, or electricity, decades after its construction. "Our model for economic growth is not one based on balanced budgets," said longtime Sciacca resident Calogero Mannino, 73 years old, one of the town's principal rainmakers.

Bankia and three other Spanish lenders will win European Union approval for government bailouts by the end of November, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said, Bloomberg reported. “The Bank of Spain, the Commission and the management of the four entities have been working on their restructuring plans during the summer, and the commission will take a decision approving them by the end of November,” Almunia said in the text of a speech he gave in Barcelona today.

A former Barclays banker who is among the new shareholders in the National Asset Management Agency’s ownership company was involved in a scheme to remove toxic assets from Barclay’s books that a top UK regulator described as “pushing the envelope too far”, the Irish Times reported. Nama yesterday said Irish Life had sold its 17 per cent stake in the special purpose vehicle that owns the loans agency to London company Walbrook Capital. One of the firms’s three founders is Australian lawyer Michael Keeley, who worked for the structured credit division of UK bank Barclays.

Manganese Bronze, maker of London's black taxi, said it is set to appoint administrators after failing to secure funding needed to survive, putting hundreds of British jobs at risk, Reuters reported. Manganese Bronze, whose taxis have been on British streets since 1948, had been in talks with its largest shareholders, including China's Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd, to secure a last-minute bailout. "The issue here was not a lack of opportunity around the quantum of support being offered," Chief Executive John Russell told Reuters on Monday.

D&M Publishers has announced that it is restructuring and has filed for creditor protection under the provisions of the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. The Vancouver-based publisher, which publishes under three separate imprints including Douglas & McIntyre, Greystone Books and New Society Publishers, says it will be working with financial advisory services company the Bowra Group to locate an investor or purchaser for its assets, The Globe and Mail reported. New Society Publishers Inc. is a separate legal entity and its business activities will continue as usual.

Tens of thousands of protesters marched through London on Saturday calling for an end to public spending cuts and tax rises launched by a government they accuse of elitism and ignorance about the plight of recession-hit voters, Reuters reported. Blowing horns and whistles, demonstrators streamed past the Houses of Parliament behind a banner declaring "Austerity is Failing", and called on Prime Minister David Cameron to do more to revive Britain's struggling economy.

The European Union summit that ended Friday suggested Germany and France, always awkward partners in managing the three-year-old euro crisis, are increasingly at odds over how to resolve it, The Wall Street Journal reported. The summit produced a tortuous compromise between the currency bloc's two biggest nations over the creation of a new euro-zone banking supervisor, but it also brought simmering disagreements between Berlin and Paris into the open.