United States

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen should intervene at the International Monetary Fund to prevent Taliban-led Afghanistan from being able to use almost $500 million in reserves, Republican House members said, Bloomberg News reported. The group of 18 lawmakers, including Arkansas’s French Hill, wrote to Yellen on Tuesday in a letter obtained by Bloomberg News, asking Yellen to take action at the fund and respond to their request by Thursday afternoon.

Greensill Capital’s bankrupt U.S. unit won court approval to sell its Finacity Corp. business to White Oak Global Advisors for $7 million after reaching a deal with unsecured creditors, Bloomberg News reported. The transaction includes an agreement with Finacity founder Adrian Katz, who dropped demands for $21.2 million in payments related to Greensill’s purchase of Finacity in 2019. In return, the bankrupt U.S. unit will not try to sue Katz or certain other insiders for their role in the deal.

London-based Pearson PLC will pay $1 million to settle charges it misled investors about a 2018 cyber intrusion involving the theft of millions of student records, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Monday, Reuters reported. The educational-publishing firm did not admit nor deny the regulator's charges, the SEC said, but in 2019 the firm disclosed in its annual report that the data breach may have included birth dates and email addresses, when, in fact, it knew that such records were stolen.

Qatar National Bank QPSC, the Middle East’s biggest lender, asked a U.S. court to order Eritrea to pay nearly $300 million of debt after the Horn of Africa nation refused to participate in two lawsuits, Bloomberg News reported. The Doha-based bank requested a judgment by default from a federal court in Washington on Friday after Eritrea failed to respond to the bank’s claim seeking to enforce a U.K. ruling in 2019. QNB alleges that President Isaias Afwerki’s government went to drastic lengths to avoid being served with key documents.

Bayer lost a third appeal against U.S. court verdicts that awarded damages to customers blaming their cancers on use of its glyphosate-based weedkillers, leaving the German drugs and pesticides group to pin hopes for legal relief on the U.S. Supreme Court, Reuters reported. A California appeals court yesterday upheld an $86 million verdict that found Bayer responsible for a couple's cancer after using Bayer's glyphosate-based Roundup against weeds.

Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. made a new, higher bid for Kansas City Southern, looking to derail the U.S. railroad’s pending merger with rival Canadian National Railway Co. ahead of an important shareholder vote less than two weeks away, Bloomberg News reported. The offer is $300 a share, Canadian Pacific said in a statement Tuesday, or about $27 billion in equity value. While that’s higher than its original $25 billion bid from March, the new price doesn’t match the $30 billion deal that Kansas City Southern’s board accepted from Canadian National in May.

Bankrupt units of a Mexican and Colombian payroll lender have secured court approval to access part of a $45 million loan to fund operations during their chapter 11 case after agreeing to install a chief restructuring officer, Reuters reported. During a virtual hearing on Wednesday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kate Stickles in Wilmington, Del., signed off on Alpha Latam Management LLC's request to tap $17.5 million of the full loan. A hearing on the rest of the loan will be held at a later date. ALM is an affiliate of Mexico’s Alpha Holding SA de CV, which is not part of the chapter 11 case.

Container shipping rates from China to the United States have scaled fresh highs above $20,000 per 40-foot box as rising retailer orders ahead of the peak U.S. shopping season add strain to global supply chains, Reuters reported. The acceleration in Delta-variant COVID-19 outbreaks in several counties has slowed global container turnaround rates. Typhoons off China's busy southern coast in late July and this week have also contributed to the crisis gripping the world's most important method for moving everything from gym equipment and furniture to car parts and electronics.

Shareholders in Mallinckrodt, the Dublin-based but U.S.-run drugmaker in the middle of a bankruptcy reorganization, are being urged by a leading corporate advisory firm to vote against some directors as a parting rebuke over its handling of the U.S. opioid crisis and executive pay, the Irish Times reported. Mallinckrodt filed for bankruptcy in Delaware last October as the company was overwhelmed by lawsuits accusing it of deceptively marketing opioids. The company is pursuing a U.S.