Sweden

Northvolt AB is asking for shareholder approval to keep building battery cells while the bankrupt electric-vehicle supplier seeks the new funding needed to emerge from chapter 11 protection, Bloomberg News reported. The extraordinary general meeting scheduled for Wednesday at Northvolt’s Stockholm headquarters is billed as a “procedural step” by the company. The gathering, announced in December, is required when equity falls below one-half of registered share capital, spokesman Martin Hofelmann said in an email.

Swedish electric-vehicle battery maker Northvolt said on Friday it expects to line up additional bankruptcy financing by late January after engaging with over 100 lenders and potential investors, Reuters reported. Northvolt entered bankruptcy on Nov. 21 with a $100-million bankruptcy loan from Swedish truck maker Scania, a shareholder and its biggest customer. But that loan was not intended to carry Northvolt through its entire bankruptcy restructuring, and the company has continued to evaluate proposals for additional financing from strategic and financial investors.

Sweden’s central bank lowered its key interest rate and signaled that borrowing costs could be lowered again next year to support the stuttering economy, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Riksbank cut its key interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to 2.50% on Thursday. The move marks a return to more gradual monetary policy easing.

Sweden’s Intrum AB has struck an agreement with a noteholder group that could resolve a key obstacle in the debt collector’s bid to restructure in U.S. bankruptcy court, Bloomberg News reported. The company had “come to terms” with the group of debt holders ahead of a hearing in the US bankruptcy court, according to Andrew M. Leblanc, a company attorney. The agreement requires the consents of other parties, a process that’s currently underway, he said at a Monday hearing in Texas.

Denmark’s biggest pension fund, ATP, is taking a major hit on its 2.3 billion-krone ($324 million) stake in troubled battery maker Northvolt AB, Danish broadcaster DR reported, according to Bloomberg News. ATP is one of the largest owners in Northvolt with a stake of about 5%. The value of that holding “probably won’t be very far from zero,” the asset manager’s Chief Executive Officer Martin Praestegaard told DR in an interview, stopping short of giving a specific amount for the writedown. “By far most of the investment is gone,” Praestegaard said, according to DR.

Swedish landlord SBB has launched a major overhaul of its debt structure as it prepares to fight a landmark litigation case against US hedge fund Fir Tree Partners in London next month, Bloomberg News reported. Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget i Norden AB, as the company is officially known, is planning to issue at least €1.7 billion ($1.8 billion) of new bonds that existing noteholders can exchange with their current securities.

Just weeks after the collapse of Swedish battery maker Northvolt AB, its founder Vargas Holding is turning its attention to another energy-intensive industry that needs cleaning up, Bloomberg News reported. Partnering with Rio Tinto Plc, Fortum Oyj and Mitsubishi Corp., Vargas plans to build a low-carbon primary aluminum plant in Finland that could be up and running late this decade. The project — named Arctial — would add another piece to the Swedish investment firm’s portfolio that also includes green steel, textile recycling and heat pumps.

Northvolt has held talks with a big industrial company on selling the business that makes electric battery packs for heavy industry, as a lack of funds forces it to try to divest one of its few profitable operations by the year-end, an internal memo shows, Reuters reported. The rush to sell is the Swedish company's latest effort to strengthen its finances and shrink the business to focus on battery cell production, rather than being an all-in-one-shop for making and recycling electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Last month, Europe's biggest hope for an EV battery champion filed for U.S.

Swedish bankruptcy levels are expected to exceed 10,000 this year, a figure that hasn’t been seen since a financial crisis in the 1990s spread from the banking sector into the wider economy, according to credit reference agency Creditsafe i Sverige AB, Bloomberg News reported. “So far this year, 9,197 limited companies have gone bankrupt, an increase of 24% compared to the same period last year and a material 64% more than two years ago,” Creditsafe Chief Executive Officer Henrik Jacobsson said in a statement Monday.