Headlines

A package of measures to help businesses contend with soaring energy prices will likely include low-cost loans and grants targeted at the sectors most affected, Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Varadkar said last week that the bulk of Ireland's budget surplus, expected to reach up to 5 billion euros ($4.99 billion) or around 2% of national income, should be spent on one-off measures to help consumers and businesses with rising prices.

SAS AB Chief Executive Officer Anko van der Werff said he’s confident the Scandinavian airline will emerge successfully from a chapter 11 restructuring after winning clearance for a $700 million financing package and seeing a rebound in its own performance, Bloomberg News reported. Approval for the Apollo Global Management funding from a US bankruptcy judge is “the biggest and most important news” for SAS and will be “vital” as it seeks to move forward with a new strategic plan, Der Werff said Thursday in an interview in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday that a staff mission will visit Lebanon next week to discuss ways to "speed up" implementation of agreed reforms required for an IMF loan program amid deteriorating living conditions in the country, Reuters reported. "We are looking to support Lebanon as strongly as we can. It's a difficult situation," IMF spokesman Gerry Rice told a regular news briefing.

Zambia's international bondholders have criticised the International Monetary Fund's debt restructuring framework as "arbitrary" and for excluding the country's domestic debt, sources involved in the process have told Reuters. Zambia has been in default for almost two years and an IMF Debt Sustainability Analysis published last week called for its debt-service-to-exports ratio to be cut to a 140% "threshold" from 153% quickly and to 84% by 2027.

Japan’s financial watchdog plans to examine how global investment banks sell controversial structured bonds in the country, a sign that a crackdown on the products is gathering pace, Bloomberg News reported. The Financial Services Agency will check whether the main issuers of such products disclose enough information to local financial firms, which buy and then distribute them to retail investors across the country, the people said, declining to be named as the discussions are private. Japan’s FSA will also look into the fees charged.

China's exporters – the last reliable pillar of the world's second-largest economy as it struggled with the pandemic, weak consumption and a property crisis – are warning of hard times ahead as softer overseas markets force them to shed workers, shift to lower-value goods and even rent out their factories, Reuters reported. Alarm bells sounded for China's $18 trillion economy when trade data last week showed export growth well short of expectations and slowing for the first time in four months.

The European Union's executive plans to raise more than 140 billion euros ($140 billion) to shield consumers from soaring energy prices by skimming off revenues from low-cost electricity generators and making fossil fuel firms share windfall profits, Reuters reported. The European Commission published the proposals on Wednesday as the 27-member European Union grapples with an energy crisis fuelled by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced C$4.5 billion ($3.43 billion) in measures on Tuesday intended to provide relief from high inflation to low-income families, Reuters reported. The measures include doubling a quarterly tax credit sent to individuals and families with low and modest incomes to offset sales tax, and a C$500, onetime top-up to a housing benefit that is provided to low earners who need help with rent, Trudeau said. Trudeau's Liberal government will also provide up to C$650 per year for dental care to children under 12 who do not have access to dental insurance.

A court in South Korea issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder of the Terraform Labs cryptocurrency ecosystem, whose implosion earlier this year sparked a global crypto rout, Bloomberg News reported. The court in Seoul issued a warrant for Do Kwon and five others on allegations that include violations of the nation’s capital markets law, according to a text message from the prosecutor’s office. All six individuals are located in Singapore, the prosecutor’s office said. Do Kwon didn’t immediately reply to an email seeking comment.

The German government has sold off its 20% stake in Lufthansa acquired during the coronavirus pandemic, it said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The state's economic stabilisation fund (WSF), which saved Lufthansa from bankruptcy during the pandemic with a bailout package totalling 9 billion euros ($8.97 billion), had progressively reduced its stake in recent years with the aim of offloading it completely by October of 2023. It has now sold its last remaining shares to international investors in a block placement for 455 million euros, the fund said in a statement on Tuesday night.