Headlines

Lending to euro-zone businesses picked up again in November, posting its strongest annual rate of growth in over a year, the European Central Bank said today, according to the Wall Street Journal. The ECB said that lending to the private sector rose by a combined €21 billion ($27.55 billion) in November and was up 2 percent on a yearly basis, due to positive net flows of €10 billion to households and €11 billion to businesses.

Indian mergers and acquisitions in 2011 may surpass this year’s record $71 billion of deals, led by oil and gas, metals and mining companies, according to M&A bankers, Bloomberg News reported today. Billionaire Sunil Mittal’s $10.7 billion acquisition of mobile-phone operators in Africa led an almost four-fold increase in takeovers this year as deals surpassed 2007’s $69 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

When the treaty establishing Europe’s common currency was approved in the early 1990s, Europe’s political and business elite had high hopes that it would bind the Continent’s disparate economies and often bickering nations as never before, the New York Times reported today. As the euro made its debut in the early 2000s, there was an outpouring of support from many citizens pleased that they would no longer have to change Spanish pesetas to French francs or Dutch guilders to German marks as they crossed borders from one country to another.

Vietnam's nearly-bankrupt shipbuilder Vinashin yesterday said that it will be allowed to take out interest-free loans, in another concession after it reportedly defaulted on a debt to international lenders, Agence France-Presse reported, according to Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review today. Vinashin said Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung had authorized companies, workers, and former employees of Vinashin group to borrow money at zero percent interest from the state-owned Development Bank of Vietnam.

Hong Kong audit firm JBPB & Co., formerly called Grant Thornton, is suing six former partners for a minimum HK$640 million ($82.3 million) alleging that they failed to "act honestly and in good faith" to advance the plaintiff's business interests, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The suit, filed on Dec.

Several Canadian banks are taking advantage of their solid balance sheets as well as the current revamping and consolidation of the American banking system to again look south for expansion, the New York Times reported today. Last week, the Toronto-Dominion Bank agreed to pay $6.3 billion for Chrysler Financial. Bank of Montreal earlier this month bought Marshall & Ilsley, a bank based in Milwaukee, for $4.1 billion.

Japan Airlines Corp. is privately placing stock with its top executives as the bankrupt carrier looks to boost accountability and reduce its tax burden, the Nikkei reported today, according to Reuters. About two dozen top executives, including President Masaru Onishi, took part in a recent offering, with each investing several hundred thousand yen. The combined stake comes to less than 1 percent. JAL needed to have multiple shareholders since a wholly owned subsidiary cannot adopt consolidated taxation, it said.

Multinational companies are facing a new British law they fear will force them to rethink their compliance strategies and upend their business practices, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The new law, called the Bribery Act, takes effect in April and it resembles the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which bars companies that trade on U.S. exchanges from bribing foreign government officials to gain a business advantage. The British law, however, is more sweeping than its American counterpart, and corporate legal advisers are uncertain how extensive the fallout might be.

Credit Suisse Group is selling a $2.8 billion portfolio of soured commercial-property loans to Apollo Management LP for $1.2 billion, marking one of the largest bank sales of distressed real estate loans since the downturn, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The properties backed by the loans include apartment buildings in Germany and hotels in Denmark, Sweden and France, many of them of lower quality and in hard-hit locales.

Bankers’ pay should be more transparent to investors to prevent lenders from hiding policies that encourage irresponsible risk taking, global regulators said in draft proposals, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. International rules on the disclosure of pay “will allow market participants to assess the quality of a bank’s compensation practices and the incentives towards risk taking they support,” said Fernando Vargas, chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s task force on remuneration.