Lawyers for insolvent Laurentian University continue to defend against a Speaker's warrant issued by the Ontario Legislature that aims to force the Sudbury school to give up privileged information to the auditor general, CBC.ca reported. A legislative committee tasked Bonnie Lysyk with a special audit last spring to look into how the university became insolvent.

Mexico central bank board member Jonathan Heath sounded the alarm about accelerating core inflation, saying in a series of tweets that the situation “looks grave” and may signal a structural problem, Bloomberg News reported. Even though annual inflation at the end of 2021 was marginally slower than in November and even slower than analyst forecasts, it isn’t good news because core prices are rising faster, Heath said. The annual core figure stood at 6% in the last half of December. It “signals the persistence of a more inertial or even structural problem,” Heath said in one Twitter post.

CannTrust Holdings Inc., the troubled Canadian cannabis producer whose former executives have been charged with fraud, is preparing to wind down if it can’t find a way to fix a default by the end of the month, Bloomberg News reported. The Vaughan, Ontario-based company breached a minimum earnings covenant on its C$22.5 million ($17.7 million) bankruptcy loan, and is currently in negotiations with potential investors and strategic partners over ways to address the default and its liquidity shortfall, according to a Thursday statement.

Mexico's central bank signaled concern over rising inflation and labor costs as its board voted last month to raise its benchmark interest rate by 50 basis points to 5.50%, minutes from the latest monetary policy meeting showed on Thursday, Reuters reported. "All members mentioned that headline and core inflation expectations for 2021, 2022 and for the next 12 months increased again, along with medium-term expectations, while long-term expectations have remained stable at levels above the target," the Bank of Mexico said in the latest minutes.

Passenger traffic at Grupo Aeromexico in December reached its highest level since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mexican airline said on Thursday, Reuters reported. Aeromexico transported 1.74 million passengers last month, or 98.9% of the 1.76 million people it moved in December 2019, the company said in a statement. Aeromexico's total offer, measured in available seat-kilometers (ASKs), was equivalent to 82.6% of the capacity of December 2019, the company said. Domestic capacity was up 13.6% from December 2019, while international capacity was 70.7% of that month.

A Canadian restaurant that’s made headlines for bucking COVID rules has filed for bankruptcy, the Toronto Star reported. Nique Restaurant Inc. filed for an “assignment in bankruptcy” on Dec. 29, 2021, according to a notice of insolvency that ran in The Spectator on Wednesday. The notice provides few details about the bankruptcy, but notes that the first meeting of creditors of the business will be held later this month in Burlington.

The bonds backed in bitcoin (BTC) that the Government of El Salvador will launch will be available in February and March 2022. This was confirmed on January 4, by the Minister of Finance, Alejandro Zelaya, CVBJ.biz reported. The Salvadoran official hopes that the strategy will be successful. Recall that, as reported by CriptoNoticias in November, the Central American country seeks to raise USD $1 billion through these bonds. The money will be used both to build the Bitcoin City and to acquire more BTC (to date, the nation has 1,391 bitcoins according to publicly available information).

Mexico's annual auto sales rose by 6.8% in 2021, but were still far short of pre-pandemic levels as the car industry struggles to cope with shortfalls in semiconductors, official data showed on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Mexico sold 1,014,680 light vehicles last year, according to figures from the national statistics agency (INEGI) after sales fell 27.9% to 950,063 in 2020, a nine-year low. There were 1.3 million vehicles sold in 2019 before the pandemic while 2016 saw a record 1.6 million sales.

Canada's Centerra Gold on Monday confirmed it was in talks with the Kyrgyzstan government for an out-of-court settlement over a dispute in which the state seized the company's Kumtor mine, Reuters reported. In May 2021, Centerra kicked off arbitration against the former Soviet republic after it took over the country's biggest mine for allegedly posing danger to human lives or the environment. The company also froze the government's stake when it seized the mine, meaning it does not have voting rights, nor is it entitled to dividends.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned people on December 30 not to go on cruises, regardless of their vaccination status, because of onboard outbreaks fueled by the omicron variant, the Associated Press reported. The CDC said that it has more than 90 cruise ships under investigation or observation as a result of COVID-19 cases. The agency did not disclose the number of infections.