Headlines

The universities regulator has announced a contract of up to £4mn for professional services companies to manage a potential wave of insolvencies, as the sector faces a looming funding crisis, the Financial Times reported. The Office for Students (OfS) announced the tender last week after education secretary Bridget Phillipson made it clear that the government will not bail out universities despite warnings from university leaders that several institutions are already on the brink of insolvency.

Bank of Montreal has sold about £300 million ($383 million) of Thames Water’s senior debt at an almost 30% discount, Bloomberg News reported. The Canadian lender sold a mix of the utility firm’s senior debt, including bilateral loans and privately placed debt, split across Class A instruments with different maturities. The debt was sold for a little over 70% of its face value, following an auction process with a reserve price of 65%, which closed on Friday, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg News.

Parents of children who attended a nursery which closed without notice have said they are owed hundreds of pounds and have had to find alternative childcare, BBC.com reported. Capellas in Balsall Common closed its doors in the middle of June. Staff told the BBC that they had not been paid, and they had no idea if it was coming. The nursery's director, Martin Wallbank, said that the closure was due to financial pressures, and that all parents would receive owed payments through the insolvency process. He added that payments were also being made to staff pensions.

Turkey’s headline inflation saw the sharpest drop in nearly two years in July, a slowdown largely due to base effects that officials may overlook as they focus on more immediate risks to prices, Bloomberg News reported. Data on Monday showed headline inflation slipped to 61.8% in July, from 71.6% the previous month. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for 62%. Monthly price growth, the central bank’s preferred gauge, came in at 3.23% after a gain of 1.64% in June, more than estimated by analysts.

“Back in the day,” said Lim Hyung-kyu, a retired Samsung Electronics executive now in his 70s, “my weeks were Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday, Friday,” the New York Times reported Mr. Lim joined Samsung, South Korea’s largest company, in 1976 and rose through the ranks to chief technology officer. For much of his 30-plus years at Samsung, working on the weekends was normal — and legal under the nation’s labor laws. “I didn’t mind,” Mr. Lim said. “It was fun for me.” Things are different now.

Glencore Plc will pay $152 million after Swiss authorities wrapped up an investigation into the commodities trader and miner, marking the end of more than six years of legal probes across Europe and the Americas, Bloomberg News reported. Swiss prosecutors found that Glencore failed to take reasonable measures to prevent the bribery of a Congolese public official by a business partner in 2011, the office of the attorney general said in a statement on Monday.

Intercontinental Exchange Inc. rejected a proposal to include debt issued by the European Union in its government bond benchmarks, the latest blow to the bloc’s quest to attract a larger pool of investors, Bloomberg News reported. The index provider and owner of the New York Stock Exchange said it wouldn’t alter its definition of a sovereign issuer, which would have allowed for the change. The decision follows a similar move by MSCI Inc. in June. It’s a setback for the EU, which has been lobbying to reclassify its bonds since the end of last year.

A court in Dusseldorf has initiated insolvency proceedings for fashion retailer Esprit's European operations, impacting Esprit Europe GmbH and six other German subsidiaries, according to court documents published on Thursday, DPA International reported. The global firm, which filed for bankruptcy in May due to insolvency and over-indebtedness, has appointed Lucas Flöther as custodian. About 1,300 employees have been notified and salary payments are assured until insolvency-related terminations take effect.

Struggling Oudenaarde-based GAN specialist BelGaN has failed to secure the investment needed to continue and has declared bankruptcy, Evertiq.com reported. BelGaN's history goes back to 2008, when ON Semiconductor acquired the Oudenaarde site and made semiconductor products for the automotive, industrial and medical sectors. In 2022, BelGaN acquired the fab, and decided to switch production from traditional silicon chips to gallium nitride chips, which can be used in electric chargers, electric cars and data centres. The company ran out of cash to fund the transition, hence this announcement.

U.S.-based Glas Trust is asking an Indian court to not quash insolvency proceedings for ed-tech giant Byju's as lenders the trust represents are owed $1 billion, posing a new challenge for the Indian startup that was once the nation's biggest, the Economic Times of India reported. Byju's was valued at $22 billion in 2022 before being hit with many setbacks including boardroom exits, an auditor resignation and a public spat with foreign investors over mismanagement. The company has denied any wrongdoing.