Headlines

Barclays is joining forces with an insolvency specialist to try to recover millions of pounds of misappropriated loans advanced under the UK government’s Covid-19 bounceback scheme, the Irish Times reported. The bank is among the lenders that provided loans of up to £50,000 (€56,000) to small companies at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, which were guaranteed by the government. About £46 billion was given to companies with only minimal eligibility checks to encourage banks to lend quickly.

The chief executive of German utility Uniper SE plans to resign this year after the company, hit hard by Russia’s decision to halt most of its natural-gas exports to Europe, was nationalized by the government, the Wall Street Journal reported. Klaus-Dieter Maubach, who was appointed to the position in 2021, will exercise a special right of termination due to the change of ownership, the company said Tuesday. Uniper’s Chief Operating Officer David Bryson will also depart, using the same right.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa played down suggestions that an amendment to the central bank’s mandate is imminent, while confirming that a possible change remains under discussion, Bloomberg News reported. Any change to the mandate of the South African Reserve Bank, which focuses on curbing inflation, will take time, Ramaphosa, told reporters in Johannesburg on Monday. Last week Gwede Mantashe, the chairman of the ruling African National Congress, said the party had agreed at its national conference to change the mandate, prompting a decline in the value of the rand.

Brazil's inflation ended 2022 with a sharp slowdown from double-digit peaks seen throughout the year on the back of fiscal measures and an aggressive monetary policy tightening, but once again missed the government's official target, Reuters reported. The benchmark IPCA consumer price index rose 5.79% last year, statistics agency IBGE said on Tuesday. The result missed both the central bank's annual target of 3.5% and the top 5% of its tolerance band, marking the second straight year that it had done so.

Nearly 3.5 million people — or about one in 12 working-age adults in Britain — who have long-term health conditions are not working or looking for work, the New York Times reported. The number ballooned during the first two years of the pandemic when more than half a million more people reported they had a long-term sickness, with physical and mental health conditions, according to analysis by economists at the Bank of England.

More than 1,000 firms could go bust this year if the economic downturn worsens, racking up combined losses of €4bn, according to PwC’s latest insolvency barometer, the Independent reported. Construction, real estate, hospitality and arts businesses are the most at risk, the consulting firm said. A total of 527 companies went bust last year, 39pc up on 2021, when insolvencies were artificially lowered due to government supports. Irish firms that failed in 2022 owed €1.8bn between them, with the average debt per small- or medium-sized firm amounting to around €2m.

UK-based energy services provider Altera Infrastructure has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a few months after filing for it, Offshore-Energy.biz reported. Thanks to a charter for an FPSO, which is expected to be deployed at one of the largest undeveloped oil fields in the UK, the firm expects to strengthen its balance sheet further, as it sees this as a foundation for long-term growth if this project goes ahead. Back in August 2022, Altera Infrastructure, formerly a part of Teekay, entered a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process in the U.S. to address its debt of over $1.5 billion.

Over 800,000 UK households will see their mortgage rates more than double this year as they come off low fixed-rate deals, adding to the pressure on living standards, Bloomberg News reported. In total, more than 1.4 million fixed-rate borrowers will have to renew their mortgage in 2023, with 57% currently on deals of less than 2%, according to an Office for National Statistics analysis of Bank of England data. The average variable rate mortgage is currently 4.41% and fixed-rate deals start at around 5%.

Argentina and China have formalized the expansion of a currency swap deal, allowing the South American country to increase its depleted foreign currency reserves, the Argentine central bank said on Sunday, Reuters reported. Argentina's government needs to rebuild reserves to cover trade costs and future debt repayments, and more reserves are a key objective of a major debt deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). President Alberto Fernandez announced the deal in November last year and said at the time it was worth $5 billion.

The euro zone's unemployment rate was unchanged at a record low in November as expected, with the absolute number of people without jobs falling slightly further, the European Union's statistics office Eurostat said on Monday, Reuters reported. Eurostat said that the unemployment rate in the 20 countries now sharing the euro in November 2022 was 6.5% of the workforce, the same as in October and in line with forecasts by economists polled by Reuters.