Banking

Bloomberg Authorities in Italy searched the headquarters of the country’s biggest phone carriers as part of an antitrust probe over pricing of mobile and fixed-line services. Financial police and officials from the Italian Antitrust Agency searched offices in Rome and Milan of Telecom Italia SpA, Vodafone Group’s local unit, Swisscom AG’s Fastweb, Wind Tre and industry lobby Asstel, the regulator ...

Bloomberg Martin Gilbert and Keith Skeoch’s $1 trillion dream has grown a little more distant. Six months after merging Scotland’s two biggest money managers to create a giant capable of competing with the largest US companies, the co-chiefs of Standard Life Aberdeen Plc are instead digesting the potential loss of almost 20 percent of the funds at their asset-management business. ...

Bloomberg Latvian central bank Governor Ilmars Rimsevics was detained by the country’s anti-corruption bureau, the prime minister said in a statement on Sunday. The government has full trust in the work of the anti-graft body and won’t interfere in its work, according to the statement sent by the office of Premier Maris Kucinskis. No further details on the reason for ...

Bloomberg As the European Union pushes for a new role in military matters, the bloc has thrust its development bank into the center of a policy struggle that reveals an old fissure over the very nature of the EU project. The European Investment Bank (EIB) is getting prodded to be bolder about lending to defense companies by a France-led group ...

Bloomberg Credit Agricole SA is seeking to sell about 6 billion euros ($7.5 billion) of Italian non-performing loans bought from other institutions a decade or more ago, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The French bank is trying to offload its holdings in four different bad-loan securitizations, along with the Luxembourg-based entity that issued them, said the people, ...

Bloomberg US Bancorp agreed to pay about $600 million to settle US allegations that it failed to guard against money laundering, under a deal announced in New York. Prosecutors said the Minneapolis-based bank failed to report suspicious activities of a longtime customer, Scott Tucker, who was using the bank to launder proceeds of a fraudulent payday lending scam. Tucker was ...

Bloomberg The world’s central bankers are learning that there’s virtually no room for error as they try to find a way out of a decade of extreme monetary stimulus. That’s the message from Norway’s central bank governor, Oystein Olsen, who also oversees the country’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund. “Unexpected things can happen, and the warning, call it a small ...

Bloomberg European Central Bank policy maker Benoit Coeure signalled that officials are close to starting talks on altering their policy language as they prepare for the eventual end of bond purchases. “Our communication on monetary policy will change” Coeure told reporters on in Skopje, Macedonia. “Certainly the expectation is that this will be discussed in early 2018.” The ECB is ...

Bloomberg Fewer than half the world’s biggest banks are doing enough to forestall climate change that poses risks to their markets and economies. Most lenders still aren’t producing firm targets for low-carbon financial products that will aid efforts to keep temperatures from rising, according to a survey of 59 banks conducted by Boston Common Asset Management LLC. Even the strongest ...

Bloomberg One of India’s biggest banks has accused jeweller Nirav Modi — who’s dressed stars including Kate Winslet and Priyanka Chopra — of involvement in a multi-billion dollar fraud that could extend to other lenders, said people familiar with the matter. Punjab National Bank filed a complaint with the Central Bureau of Investigation, the federal investigation agency, alleging that Modi ...