With sterling debt investors shaken by the growing strain on the UK high street, British bed seller Dreams is turning to an unusual source of funding: Sweden. Owner Sun Capital Partners this week began marketing a €175m high-yield bond under Swedish law to fund a “dividend recapitalisation” of Dreams, a term for when private equity groups layer debt on a company to take money out for themselves, the Financial Times reported. The Florida-based firm bought the bed retailer out of administration five years ago and unsuccessfully sought to sell the business last year.
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Nasdaq's Nordic commodities exchange has reached agreement on the sale of assets belonging to a private trader who defaulted on his commitments last week, it said on Friday, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Einar Aas, a Norwegian derivatives trader who made large bets on the power market, left a 114 million euro ($134 million) hole in Nasdaq's Nordic clearing house buffers when his funds ran out. Within just two working days of the default, members of the exchange, and Nasdaq itself, were forced to replenish the funds in order to continue trading.
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Sweden’s financial regulator on Friday vowed to investigate how a Nordic power trader that this week racked up huge losses and barred by Nasdaq Inc. was able to act as his own clearer, or guarantor of trades, Bloomberg News reported. “This is a question that Nasdaq Clearing has to answer,” Daniel Gedeon, director of financial markets infrastructure supervision at the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, said by email.
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Europe’s biggest debt collector says an increase in volumes in Sweden and Norway could be an early indication that households are starting to struggle paying off their consumer loans after debt burdens swelled to records, Bloomberg News reported. Volumes under Intrum AB’s existing credit-management services contracts in the two countries, in which it collects money from non-paying clients of financial institutions, grew by more than 15 percent in the first half of the year.
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The property market has fallen a little closer to Earth: prices dropped by 9% between September and January, largely because of a surfeit of pricey new flats. They then steadied, and are around 5% below the peak—and 50% higher than at the start of 2013, calculates Valueguard, a data provider. As Swedes have borrowed to buy, their debts have risen, The Economist reported. Finansinspektionen (FI), the financial-stability supervisor, estimates that borrowers’ debts rose by 36% between 2012 and 2017, while disposable incomes went up by 13%.
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The financial industries of Sweden and Denmark were quick to criticize the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s completed framework on Thursday, arguing it will hit Scandinavian lenders too hard, Bloomberg News reported. “The Basel standards will, if they are fully implemented in the EU and Sweden, have large negative effects for Swedish banks, their clients and the Swedish economy,” Hans Lindberg, the head of the Swedish Bankers’ Association, said in a statement on Thursday.
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The 6,000 job cuts announced last week at Nordea Bank AB are just a down payment for an industry facing radical overhaul, says Chief Executive Officer Casper von Koskull. “If somebody says, where are we, or where are banks, 10 years from now, banks could easily have half what they have today,” in terms of personnel, von Koskull said in an interview in London on Friday. Nordea last week stunned unions, analysts and investors when it revealed the staff reductions, which amount to well over a tenth of the work force of the Swedish bank, Bloomberg News reported.
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Ericsson's Indian subsidiary has filed insolvency petitions against Reliance Communications and two of its companies to recover unpaid dues, the Indian mobile operator said in a stock exchange filing on Wednesday, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The Swedish telecoms equipment maker, which signed a seven-year deal in 2014 to operate and manage Reliance Communications' nationwide network, is seeking a total of 11.55 billion rupees ($180 million) from the three companies, the filing said.
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A European banking giant just snubbed one of the world’s strictest financial supervisors by moving to a more accommodating regulatory setting, Bloomberg News reported. Nordea Bank AB’s decision to relocate its headquarters from Sweden to Finland puts the Nordic region’s only global systemically important bank inside the euro zone. After months of railing against Swedish efforts to make banks pay more to protect taxpayers, Nordea estimates its decision to go to Helsinki will save it as much as $1.3 billion in regulatory costs.
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When the biggest Nordic bank turned its subsidiaries into branches, regulators in Finland, Denmark and Norway complained they were left with too-big-to fail operations but no power to rein them in. Oversight was instead left to Sweden. But the full consequences of Nordea Bank AB’s decision to consolidate its Nordic operations are only gradually becoming clear, Bloomberg News reported. In a step that’s expected to be copied elsewhere in the European Union, Stockholm-based Nordea’s restructuring was completed on Jan. 1 after long talks with the relevant Nordic authorities.
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