Headlines

Credit Suisse has lodged a $440 million claim against Japan's SoftBank Group Corp in London as it presses ahead with formal proceedings in a dispute borne from the failure of Greensill Capital, a finance firm, Reuters reported. The Swiss lender is trying to recover client funds that Greensill had lent to Katerra, a SoftBank-backed U.S. construction group that filed for bankruptcy in 2021. SoftBank has vowed to vigorously fight the claim. The collapse of Greensill, along with a string of scandals, helped dent confidence in the 167-year-old Swiss bank.

On 20 January 2023, the Interim Proposal on the Reform of Secured Transaction Law (“Interim Proposal“) was published by the Japanese government, according to an analysis on Lexology.com. The Interim Proposal is, among other things, intended to govern security interests created by secured transactions, such as security assignments and sales with retention of title, that have been recognized by court precedents. The Interim Proposal also considers the introduction of a new type of security interest over all the assets of a company’s business.

Brazil's government announced a package of 13 measures on Thursday to ease consumer access to credit and reduce associated costs in the capital and insurance markets, a move the new leftist administration hopes will boost investment and revitalize a slowing economy, Reuters reported. Among the measures is the federal government's proposal to provide counter-guarantees for public-private partnership projects at the state and municipal levels, the Finance Ministry said in a presentation.

Fifty-nine jobs at a historic Dundee business have been saved after a U.S. synthetic sports turf specialist stepped in, Herald Scotland reported. Joint administrators Michelle Elliot and Callum Carmichael, partners of FRP Advisory, have sold Dundee-based carpet yarns specialist Bonar Yarns to Newman Yarns, a new business created for the purposes of the acquisition. Newman Yarns was founded by John Newman, owner of Elite Turf USA, a distributor and installer of synthetic sports turf.

Swiss inflation may be low compared to other countries but is still too high, Swiss National Bank Vice Chairman Martin Schlegel said on Wednesday, hinting at possible further interest rates ahead, Reuters reported. "It is clearly above the level we associate with price stability," Schlegel told an event in Winterthur. "We cannot rule out further interest rate increases." Swiss inflation dipped to 2.9% in March from 3.4% in February, high by Swiss standards and above the SNB's target for inflation at 0-2% - which it defines as price stability.

Zambia's official creditors, which include China, are getting closer to signing a memorandum of understanding on debt relief to the country in May, in what would be a key step needed to pave the way for more IMF funding, sources told Reuters. Zambia has been in default since 2020 when it became one of the first major sovereign casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic era, though progress in overhauling its debt burden has been slow. Zambia's external debt amounted to $18.6 billion by end-2022, according to government data, with China being its biggest bilateral creditor.

Hungary’s capital Budapest adopted a “survival package” of cuts to avoid bankruptcy as the opposition-led city’s mayor blamed Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government for squeezing revenue for political gain, Bloomberg News reported. In the latest clash between Orban’s nationalist government and cities led by Hungary’s fractured opposition, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony said his office would stop paying taxes to the country’s Finance Ministry in an effort to keep providing services including public transport and paychecks for the city’s 27,000 employees.

The European Union on Tuesday proposed making it harder for states to pour billions of euros of aid into an ailing bank, as Italy did with Monte dei Paschi di Siena six years ago, Reuters reported. Proposals from the EU's executive seek to ensure that banks hold enough resources, in particular debt that can be written down to release cash in a crisis, to avoid taxpayer handouts. The recent collapses in the United States of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank and the forced takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS last month were a reminder that failures still occur.

A $1.2 trillion liquidity crunch looms for Europe’s lenders, testing their ability to stand on their own after more than a decade of easy money from the European Central Bank, the Wall Street Journal reported. The biggest hurdle will come in late June, when banks will have to pay back about 478 billion euros, equivalent to some $525 billion, of ultracheap loans to the central bank. Those loans were handed out at the height of the pandemic to ensure banks kept lending as lockdowns brought business to a halt.

Britain’s inflation rate slowed last month, but is likely to bring only limited relief to households as it stubbornly held in the double digits because of rapidly rising food prices, the New York Times reported. Consumer prices rose 10.1 percent in March from a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday, a slightly slower pace than the 10.4 percent in February. But economists had expected the country’s inflation rate to drop below 10 percent for the first time since the summer.