Headlines

Metro Bank Holdings Plc said it has secured sufficient consent from its bondholders to extend its senior debt and restructure its junior notes as part of a rescue deal agreed over the weekend, Bloomberg News reported. The UK challenger bank has received support from holders of over 75% in value of both its senior and junior notes, potentially making the deal binding for all creditors, according to a statement on Wednesday.

Deutsche Bank AG squared off against the U.S. parent company of Lehman Brothers in a London court this week, hoping to squeeze more money from obscure notes issued by the long-dead bank’s U.K. arm, Bloomberg News reported. The German lender argued that it should be paid money recovered from the U.K. unit ahead of the company’s U.S. parent. Deutsche Bank is leading the case as a holder of a certain type of junior security issued from Lehman’s European unit.

China reached a tentative debt agreement with Sri Lanka, front-running separate talks the International Monetary Fund and other creditors are holding with the South Asian nation and catching them by surprise, Bloomberg News reported. The deal between Export-Import Bank of China and Sri Lanka was reached late last month, China’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday, without providing details of the pact. The IMF, Paris Club members including Japan, and other lenders like India are expected to hold talks this week in Morocco on a debt restructuring plan.

As more Chinese property developers move towards restructuring billions of dollars of debt, their offshore creditors are expected to face another setback - the prospects of revamp terms being tightened due to a worsening outlook for the county's real estate sector, Reuters reported. So far, developers accounting for 40% of Chinese home sales have defaulted on their debt obligations since 2021, according to JPMorgan. Those defaulted companies, mostly private, have issued around $110 billion worth of high-yield offshore bonds.

Israel has frozen cryptocurrency accounts used to solicit donations for the Palestinian militant group Hamas on social media, police said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Hamas launched devastating attacks from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, in one of the most serious escalations in the Israel-Palestinian conflict in years. "According to suspicions, with the outbreak of the war, Hamas' terrorist organisation initiated a fundraising campaign on social networks, urging the public to deposit cryptocurrencies into their accounts," a police statement said.

In the latest blow to Binance’s global ambitions, a Brazilian congressional committee has recommended the indictment of four of the company’s senior leaders, including its founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao, Bloomberg News reported. The committee, which had been conducting a probe into crypto-related ponzi schemes in Brazil, can only make suggestions. Brazilian police will decide whether to proceed with actual indictments.

Britain's financial regulator on Tuesday said it was stopping peer-to-peer platform rebuildingsociety.com from approving financial promotions for Binance and other crypto asset firms, days after Binance announced it had partnered with the company, Reuters reported. Cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which is unregulated in Britain, in a blog post on Sunday said it had launched a new domain for UK users and that rebuildingsociety.com would be approving its marketing and communications materials.

Germany's government said Wednesday that it expects the country's economy to shrink by 0.4% this year, joining a string of other forecasters in revising sharply downward its outlook for Europe's biggest economy, the Associated Press reported. The revised forecast contrasted with the 0.4% growth that the government predicted in late April.

Countries like Saudi Arabia, Norway and Chile have long used sovereign-wealth funds to sock away windfall profits from periods of high prices for commodity exports like oil and metals for future years when their own production winds down or international prices plunge, the Wall Street Journal reported. Ireland on Tuesday created its own rainy-day fund thanks to outsize profits from an unusual and controversial source of income: U.S. technology and pharmaceutical giants seeking to lower their tax bills.

Chinese electric vehicle startup WM Motor has filed for bankruptcy, marking the demise of a promising standout among China's EV makers as price competition in the world's largest auto market heats up, Reuters reported. A court in Shanghai is handling the bankruptcy case, according to a filing dated Monday on the national enterprise bankruptcy information disclosure platform. "WM Motor's planned reorganisation will introduce strategic investors from across the globe to achieve its rebirth," the company said in a statement posted on its official Weibo account on Tuesday.