Headlines

The Reserve Bank of India said on Monday that it has superseded the board of Aviom India Housing Finance due to governance concerns and payment defaults and plans to start bankruptcy proceedings against the company, Reuters reported. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said that it has appointed Ram Kumar, the former chief general manager of state-run Punjab National Bank as the administrator for the housing finance company. It did not specify the nature of the governance concerns.

Angell, a French smart electric bike startup, has announced in an email to customers that the company is declaring insolvency and approaching a court to ask for judicial liquidation, TechCrunch.com reported. “It’s over for Angell,” said company co-founder and CEO Marc Simoncini on Instagram.

China Vanke, one of China’s largest property developers, said on Monday that its top executives were stepping down and warned of a $6.2 billion loss for 2024, the latest sign that China’s grueling multiyear property downturn has not reached the bottom, the New York Times reported. In a filing in Hong Kong, Vanke said that its chairman, Yu Liang, would leave his post for “work adjustment reasons.” Zhu Jiusheng, the chief executive, would resign “due to health reasons,” the company said.

China’s official gauge of factory activity tumbled into contractionary territory in January as factories suspended operations days ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The manufacturing purchasing managers index fell to 49.1 in January from 50.1 in December, according to data released Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics. That ended a three-month streak of the gauge staying above the 50 mark separating expansion from contraction.

The hearing to present the current status of the insolvency proceedings around KTM and its subsidiaries revealed that the companies have nearly €2.4 billion of collective debt, MotoMatters.com reported. But that Pierer Mobility is in talks with 23 investors to save the company. The hearing established that there are grounds to believe that KTM will be saved as a going concern, and will be able to repay the statutory minimum 30% of debts owed to creditors within the 2 year time period required by Austrian law. But the scale of KTM's financial problems are huge.

Austrian property tycoon Rene Benko can remain in custody for a further 14 days, a Vienna court ruled on Friday, after the founder of collapsed property group Signa was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of trying to hide assets from creditors, Reuters reported. Prosecutors said on Thursday that, in the context of his personal insolvency, 47-year-old Benko was suspected of secretly using a trust meant for his immediate family to keep those assets from being recovered.

The Canadian government said Friday it would provide extraordinary financing to Canada Post to avoid insolvency at the state-owned mail service, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bridge financing totals 1.03 billion Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $720 million, and will be provided on an as-needed basis to pay obligations. The government said Canada Post will fall below its necessary operating cash requirements this year. “Providing this cash injection will prevent insolvency and ensure the continuity of postal services,” the government said.

German carmakers and their suppliers have announced tens of thousands of job cuts. Germany’s manufacturing industry, the world’s third largest, has shrunk steadily for seven years. And Germany’s economy as a whole has contracted for the past two years, marking only the second back-to-back annual contraction in records dating back to 1951, according to Germany’s federal statistics agency, the Wall Street Journal reported. Gross domestic product has roughly flatlined since 2019, before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic—the longest period of stagnation since the end of World War II.

The number of unemployed people in France climbed sharply in the last months of 2024 as a chilly economic environment and enduring political uncertainty took their toll on the country’s labor market, the Wall Street Journal reported. The total of jobless people rose 4% to 2.93 million in the fourth quarter compared with the previous quarter, figures from national jobs agency France Travail showed Monday. The rise was particularly steep among workers younger than 25, the figures showed.

U.K. firms are set for a tough year as financial distress makes a historic jump in every sector across the country, a Begbies Traynor study said, the Wall Street Journal reported. The U.K. business recovery, financial advisory and property services consultancy on Friday published its latest Red Flag Alert report, noting a worrying surge in the number of U.K. businesses entering “critical” financial distress in the final quarter of 2024. Critical financial distress rose by 50.2% in the quarter to 46,853 companies, underscoring a deteriorating outlook, it said.