Headlines

Despite a successful investment round in January, and expansion plans, UK electric car subscription service Onto is now facing insolvency, Electrive.com reported. Onto is now in administration, despite raising large investments in January this year. The company raised £100 million (nearly €114 million) from global investment group CDPQ and asset manager Pollen Street to expand its UK fleet. There was even talk of expanding to other regions.

The car manufacturer B-ON, which had taken over Streetscooter, among others, is apparently bankrupt, Electrive.com reported. The group has now filed for insolvency at the Aachen District Court and put the production of the Streetscooter on hold. It is unclear how the imbalance came about. The company had orders, said Jürgen Müller, chairman of the works council, to the Aachener Zeitung. The business figures for the past year presented in April also looked good at first.

China’s giant housing industry is lurching into a new crisis that threatens to be the country’s worst yet, the Wall Street Journal reported. Two years ago, the debt-laden developer China Evergrande Group spiraled into insolvency, bursting the country’s real-estate bubble and setting off a chain of developer defaults and business losses. The industry’s troubles have dragged down China’s economy. Now China’s largest privately run property developer, Country Garden, is struggling to survive.

The involvement of two Chinese state-owned financial firms in Zhongrong International Trust Co's operations and management may diffuse risk at the troubled shadow bank but does little to ease concerns about missed payments, analysts and investors said, Reuters reported. The shadow bank, which traditionally had sizable real estate exposure, missed payments on dozens of so-called trust products since late July, roiling markets and raising fears that China's financial system may be at risk from the property sector crisis.

Building permits for apartments in Germany fell 31.5% in July from a year earlier, the statistics office disclosed on Monday, highlighting a slump in demand plaguing the construction and real estate industry, Reuters reported. The nosedive in permits comes amid calls from firms for stimulus from Berlin to support the industry ahead of a meeting next week with Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The statistics office attributed the decline in demand to high building costs and difficulties in getting financing, factors that have deepened stress across the broader sector.

Padel, the racket sport craze currently sweeping across much of the planet, has turned into a cautionary tale for investors in one of the countries that first fully embraced it: Sweden, Bloomberg News reported. Padel centers in the biggest Nordic country are being converted to warehouses and budget grocery stores after the racket sport’s pandemic boom turned into a bust. Almost 90 padel-related companies have filed for bankruptcy this year, according to data from credit reference agency Creditsafe.

Diego Labat, Uruguay's central bank chief, is sitting pretty. Inflation is at the lowest level in nearly two decades, the currency is one of the region's strongest, and the country is leading a regional pivot towards interest rate easing, Reuters reported. That's a sharp contrast to just across the Rio de La Plata estuary in Buenos Aires, where inflation hit 124% in August, the highest since 1991, capital controls are barely holding back a fall in the currency, and net reserve levels are in the red.

Bank of Montreal (BMO) is winding down its indirect retail auto finance business and shifting focus to other areas in a move that will result in an unspecified number of job losses, Canada's third-largest bank said, Reuters reported. The bank, which announced the move on Saturday, has conducted this business in Canada and the United States. The move comes after BMO's overall bad debt provisions rose to C$492 million, compared with C$136 million a year earlier, for the quarter ended July 31 in a sign of growing stress consumers face from a rapid rise in borrowing costs.

Company insolvencies in England and Wales in August rose 19% year on year to the third highest level since monthly record started in January 2019, as firms grapple with rising costs and uncertain economic outlook, government data showed on Friday, Reuters reported. The Insolvency Service, a government agency, reported 2,308 corporate insolvencies last month, up from 1,728 in July. Companies were mostly declared insolvent through creditors' voluntary liquidations, in which a firms' directors agree to wind up the business without a formal court order.

Canada's Canopy Growth said yesterday that it would seek bankruptcy protection for its sports nutrition products' segment BioSteel, in the pot producer's latest attempt to rein in costs. Canopy's shares rose 9.6% in early trade after the company said it expects to lower debt by C$95 million over the next two quarters after starting legal proceedings under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act in a Canadian court in Ontario and seeking recognition under chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.