Headlines

The Irish High Court has appointed a provisional liquidator to a Co Galway automation equipment firm that ran into financial difficulty following a customer’s cancellation of a major contract, the Irish Times reported. Mr Justice Oisín Quinn on Friday appointed liquidator David van Dessel to Megadale Ltd, with offices at Briarhill Business Park, Ballybrit, following a petition moved on behalf of the company itself.

Prime Minister Mark Carney's new approach to Canada's foreign policy can perhaps be distilled in one line: "We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be," BBC.com reported. That was his response when asked about the deal struck with China on Friday, despite concerns over its human rights record and nearly a year after he called China "the biggest security threat" facing Canada. The deal will see Canada ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles that it imposed in tandem with the US in 2024. In exchange, China will lower retaliatory tariffs on key Canadian agricultural products.

New Zealand’s economy is showing signs of a full blown recovery with manufacturing activity surging in December to its highest level since 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported. The BusinessNZ performance of manufacturing index rose 4.4 points to 56.1 points in December from November, well above the average of 52.5 points since the survey began. All five sub-index values were in expansion during December, led by new orders, which achieved its highest level of activity since July 2021.

A slump by Canada’s auto industry in November as a semiconductor shortage weighed on activity hit sales by factories and wholesalers and threatens to hold back economic growth in the final quarter of last year, the Wall Street Journal reported. Manufacturing shipments declined 1.2% from the month before to a seasonally adjusted 70.77 billion Canadian dollars, the equivalent of about US$50.97 billion, Statistics Canada said Thursday.

The Bank of Ireland’s latest credit and debit card data shows spending rose 5.7 per cent in December. Importantly that was higher than the 3.2 per cent inflation rate, indicating an overall increase in spending for Christmas, the Irish Times reported. Spending on electrical goods was up by 6.3 per cent compared to a year ago, while services spend spiked 5.7 per cent. About 2.5 per cent more was forked out in restaurants and pubs while retail saw its share increase 1 per cent. One notable decline was the continued fall-off in cash usage. ATM withdrawals fell once more.

South Korea is tightening its grip on how crypto platforms reach users, using app stores as an enforcement lever as regulators sharpen the boundary between compliant digital finance and unregistered crypto activity, Decrypt.com reported. The country has advanced legislation establishing a legal framework for security token offerings, creating a regulated pathway for blockchain-based issuance and trading of tokenized securities.

A $1.8bn (£1.3bn) takeover of Soho House by the entrepreneur planning to transform the BT Tower has been revived following a funding scramble, The Telegraph reported. Soho House, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has secured a new $200m funding commitment that will allow it to close a take-private deal with US hotel giant MCR Hotels. Under the revised terms, Morse Ventures, an entity owned by MCR boss Tyler Morse, will commit $50m, while MCR will commit a further $50m.

Major ocean carriers, after two years of sectarian violence that reconfigured regional shipping and the broader global supply chain, reopened services on a key Mideast route that could mean lower rates for shippers from Asia to the United States, Freight Waves reported. The announcement Thursday by Maersk that it is restarting scheduled services via the Red Sea and Suez Canal was a welcome sign of normalization amid years of violence and political turmoil across the region. Maersk’s reconfiguring of its MECL service connecting Asia and the U.S.

Crypto cards, payment cards that let users spend stablecoins and other crypto at traditional merchants, have quietly become one of the fastest-growing segments in digital payments, with volume now approaching the scale of peer-to-peer stablecoin transfers, according to new research from Artemis, CoinDesk.com reported. Monthly crypto card volume rose from roughly $100 million in early 2023 to more than $1.5 billion by late 2025, a 106% compound annual growth rate, the report said.

Four Venezuelan banks were notified this week by the ​country's government that they will split $300 million of oil revenues deposited in an account in ‌Qatar, enabling them to sell dollars to Venezuelan companies that need foreign exchange to pay for materials, two financial sources and an analyst said, Reuters reported. The injection of foreign capital comes after weeks of tightening supplies of dollars, as the U.S. seized Venezuelan oil tankers and hit the country's top revenue flow.