Headlines

A city council has said it will have to effectively declare bankruptcy if its application for emergency government help is refused, BBC.com reported. Southampton City Council said that it had ended efforts to meet a £39m budget shortfall for 2024-25 on its own.

Leading German sportscar racing outfit Project 1 Motorsport has filed for bankruptcy and will not contest the DTM in 2024, MotorSport.com reported. The team entering its 30th season, run by Hans-Bernd Kamps, has also announced that its event company Project 1 Drivetime, which ran the BMW M2 Cup on the DTM undercard, will also close down.

As fears about U.S. commercial real estate roiled German banks this month, their message was clear: don’t worry, the vast majority of our property exposure is domestic. That may not prove the comfort it seems, Bloomberg News reported. While the country has so far avoided the rapid market corrections that rattled the US, experts argue that reflects arcane accounting practices shielding its lenders and investors from taking immediate hits.

Japan's core consumer inflation slowed for a third straight month in January but beat forecasts and held at the central bank's 2% target, keeping alive expectations it will end negative interest rates by April, Reuters reported. The 2.0% gain in the core consumer prices index (CPI) was slower than the 2.3% increase in December, internal affairs and communications ministry data showed on Tuesday, underscoring views waning cost-push inflation from commodity imports could ease the pain of higher living costs.

Nigeria’s central bank, in its first policy meeting since July, announced a supersized increase in interest rates to tackle runaway inflation and stem the collapse in the country’s currency, Bloomberg News reported. Governor Olayemi Cardoso and his other 11 monetary policy committee colleagues on Tuesday raised the benchmark rate by 400 basis points to 22.75%. That exceeded the 21.25% median estimate of 12 economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

Brazil's inflation picked up in mid-February driven by higher education prices, but landed slightly below market expectations, government statistics agency IBGE said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The IPCA-15 consumer price index rose 0.78% in the period, while economists polled by Reuters expected an increase of 0.82%. In the same period of the previous month, inflation had hit 0.31%. n annual terms, inflation came in at 4.49%, below the expected 4.52%.

Bank of Nova Scotia missed analysts’ estimates for loan-loss provisions amid growing stress in consumer lending as the Canadian economy weakens as well as higher delinquencies among retail borrowers in its Latin American businesses, Bloomberg News reported. Provisions for credit losses rose to C$962 million ($713 million) in the fiscal first quarter, the Toronto-based bank said in a statement Tuesday. That was more than the C$922 million average estimate of analysts in a Bloomberg survey.

Light SA, a Brazilian utility that filed for bankruptcy protection last year, released a new version of its judicial recovery plan outlining capital increase of 1.5 billion reais amid ongoing negotiations with creditors to restructure its debt, Bloomberg News reported. The troubled Rio utility said in a filing that 1 billion reais will come from key shareholders, including Nelson Tanure, Ronaldo Cézar Coelho and Carlos Alberto Da Veiga Sicupira, who own 50% of the company.

Indian airline Go First has received two financial bids as part of its bankruptcy process, two bankers who attended a meeting of the airline's creditors said on Saturday, the Hindustan Times reported. Managing director of Spicejet Ajay Singh, along with Busy Bee Airways, jointly submitted a bid of 16 billion rupees ($193.10 million) for the airline. Another financial bid was submitted by Sharjah-based Sky One Airways, but its amount wasn't disclosed.

The bankruptcy court in Mumbai is likely to pronounce its ruling on Tuesday in an application filed by the administrator of Reliance Capital Ltd to approve the company’s acquisition by IndusInd International Holdings Ltd through the insolvency resolution process, the Economic Times of India reported. The division bench of Justice Virendra Singh Bisht and a technical member Prabhat Kumar is expected to pronounce its ruling on the approval plan of the Hinduja group-owned IndusInd International Holdings.