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More people in Singapore are applying for bankruptcy protection, with the number of applications up to this November already exceeding last year's total, Channel News Asia reported. The total of 3,380 people who have applied for bankruptcy protection so far this year is more than each of the past two pandemic-stricken years. However, the number remains below the level observed in 2019, before the onset of the pandemic. Once bankruptcy protection is granted, any legal action against the bankrupt may not proceed. Their debts are also frozen and cannot accumulate.
Portugal provided São Tomé and Príncipe with €15 million in direct support towards the country’s budget in order to “meet immediate needs,” announced minister of foreign affairs João Gomes Cravinho last Friday, the Portugal Resident reported. The funding was done through the Camões cooperation and language institute. “This amount of €15 million is to meet immediate cash-flow needs.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe is noted for reminding fellow Sri Lankans that at the time Ceylon gained independence from Britain in 1948, it was a prosperous country that the British had left, The Daily FT reported. Noting the positive stock of foreign reserves that Sri Lanka had inherited, he had said that during the Second World War, the country had even lent the colonial master. This was true because the bulk of foreign reserves had been invested in the U.K.
Now that the Cirque du Soleil has rebounded from its near-death experience during the pandemic, Duncan Fisher can wax philosophical about the wild roller-coaster ride the Montreal-based circus company went through over the past few years, the Montréal Gazette reported. “It was the worst, then it developed into the best time of my business career,” Fisher said in an interview Wednesday. The vice president of operations and general manager of the touring show division of the Cirque du Soleil paraphrased Charles Dickens, saying it was both the best of times and the worst of times.
On December 21, the Commercial Court of the Zaporizhzhia Region started proceedings on the bankruptcy of the metallurgical plant Azovstal (Mariupol, Donetsk Region), Ukrainian News reported. The court decided to open proceedings on the bankruptcy of the combine at the request of the Zaporizhvohnetryv plant (Zaporizhzhia), which is also part of the Metinvest group.
The European Commission said on Tuesday it had approved Germany's 34.5 billion euro ($36.60 billion) plan to recapitalise German natural gas trader Uniper, subject to future state divestment, management pay and acquisitions, Reuters reported. The plan complies with EU state aid rules on the necessity, appropriateness and size of the intervention, the Commission said in a statement.
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Stubbornly high inflation, soaring borrowing costs and geopolitical uncertainty hindered dealmaking in 2022, sending global mergers and acquisitions activity down by almost a third compared with last year’s record haul, Bloomberg News reported. Companies announced $3.5 trillion of deals in 2022, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, striking transactions to bulk up existing businesses, push into new sectors or reorganize operations against a volatile backdrop of slumping equity markets and forceful antitrust actions.
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China will seize the time window to implement policy measures to support the economy, aiming for an improvement in growth in early 2023, state media on Wednesday quoted the cabinet as saying, Reuters reported. The government in recent months has rolled out a flurry of policy measures to support growth, focusing on infrastructure spending and limited support for consumers, while loosening financing curbs to rescue the property sector. "There is still room for these policies and measures to release their effects," state media quoted the cabinet as saying after a regular meeting.
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Europe’s economy looks set to avoid the severe shock that the region feared amid the energy crisis resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the region’s medium-term problems look harder to fix, and leave Europe facing a struggle to retain its industrial core, the Wall Street Journal reported. Russia’s war on Ukraine and its economic fallout has shaken Europe’s export-oriented business model. Skyrocketing energy prices threaten industries at the heart of the continent’s manufacturing system, such as chemicals and metal production.
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Brexit has left the UK economy is 5.5% smaller than it would have been and added to the squeeze on public services that’s behind strikes cripling the railways and National Health Service, a prominent research group concluded, Bloomberg News reported. The Center for Economic Reform said that slower growth is also weighing on the Treasury’s revenue and that the tax increases announced in the autumn fiscal statement wouldn’t be necessary if the UK were still in the European Union’s common market.
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