Headlines

Lighthouse Immersive Inc., the company behind an interactive Vincent van Gogh exhibition displayed across the U.S., has filed for bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. The Toronto-based company filed for chapter 15 bankruptcy in Delaware yesterday alongside affiliates, a move that protects its U.S. assets while insolvency proceedings play out in its home country. While the company is best known for its van Gogh exhibit, it has also launched displays that feature Disney animation, as well as works of Frida Kahlo and Claude Monet.

Australia and Luxembourg-registered Kleos Space, which uses small satellites to detect and locate radio frequency signals to uncover illegal activity on land and sea, has filed for bankruptcy in Luxembourg, Advanced-Television.com reported. Trading in its shares in Australia had already been suspended on May 3. It already has 16 satellites in orbit (although there are problems with two) and numerous contracts in place. The business was formed in 2017 but suffered launch delays and problems with satellites. Kleos made a statement on July 26th that it had been unable to source fresh financing.

Petroleos Mexicanos’s profits fell in the second quarter as the company struggles with soaring debt, Bloomberg News reported. Pemex also confirmed it received fresh funds from the government in a capital injection worth 64.97 billion peso ($3.9 billion), said Alberto Jimenez, associate managing director of finance at the company, on a conference call with investors on Friday. In total, support under Lopez Obrador has amounted to nearly $49 billion in capitalizations, tax breaks and other assistance. “The amount of the contribution for 64.97 billion pesos is confirmed,” he said.

Growing pessimism about China’s housing market is dragging down the country’s largest surviving developer, which is again struggling to convince investors that it can weather the storm, the Wall Street Journal reported. At the start of this year, investors had regained confidence in Country Garden 2007 4.97%increase; green up pointing triangle, a 31-year-old property giant that benefited from a slew of measures that Chinese authorities rolled out in November to support the real-estate sector.

China’s top housing official urged financial regulators and lenders to strengthen efforts to revive the country’s ailing property sector, Bloomberg News reported. In a recent meeting with property developers and builders, Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Ni Hong called for homebuyers who had paid off previous mortgages to be considered as first-time purchasers, the official Xinhua news agency reported Thursday. Up to now, many buyers in big cities who have a mortgage history but don’t currently own a property are subject to higher down-payment rules.

The International Monetary Fund said Friday that it reached an agreement with Argentina that would open the door for the cash-strapped South American country to receive $7.5 billion over the next few months as part of an existing program, the Associated Press reported. The agreement, which was under negotiations for weeks, still needs approval from the IMF Executive Board, which is scheduled to meet in the second half of August, the international financial organization said in a news release.

Bill Hwang, the founder of Archegos Capital Management, on Thursday asked a judge to let him subpoena documents from 10 banks, in an effort to shift blame as he defends against criminal fraud charges that the firm's collapse was his fault, Reuters reported. In a filing in Manhattan federal court, Hwang said the documents will show that Archegos' counterparties "played a pivotal role" in the March 2021 collapse of his once-$36 billion firm, and that his swaps trades were legal. Hwang's request came three days after UBS agreed to pay $388 million in fines to U.S.

Virtually no one in Lebanon has been spared from the two-pronged financial collapse of both the banking system and the local currency, the lira, which has lost 98 percent of its value since 2019. But most of the burden has fallen on depositors who overnight lost access to money they had spent a lifetime saving, the New York Times reported.

Most European banks emerged stronger from a stress test on how they would weather a sharp economic downturn, giving them a sound footing to continue paying dividends and buying back shares, Bloomberg News reported. On aggregate, the 70 lenders in the test saw their key capital-ratio slide by 4.59 percentage points to 10.4% under an adverse scenario, the European Banking Authority said in a statement on Friday. That’s less than the 4.85 percentage-point hit in the last exam two years ago, which covered fewer banks.

The number of company insolvencies in Switzerland rose 22% in the first six months of the year compared to the same period in 2021, SwissInfo.com. Some 581 construction firms went bankrupt between January and the end of June, out of 2,822 companies in all sectors, according to research group Dunn & Bradstreet. The financial and service sector industries saw one of the largest percentage rises in bankruptcies with a 31% increase in businesses going bust. Some 30% more hotels and restaurants also went out of business.