Banking

  Reuters Malaysia’s Bank Muamalat will set up a 1 billion ringgit ($243.4 million) sukuk programme, after the Islamic lender said on Wednesday it would redeem 400 million ringgit worth of subordinated sukuk on June 15. Bank Muamalat’s new sukuk programme has loss-absorption features to meet Basel III criteria, qualifying as Tier 2 capital, rating agency RAM Ratings said in ...

  Bloomberg Nigeria’s central bank is preparing to weaken its naira and abandon a currency peg that has starved Africa’s biggest economy of dollars and slowed foreign investment to a trickle. Naira forward contracts soared to record highs as traders added to bets on a weaker currency. In a retreat for President Muhammadu Buhari, who has resisted calls to let ...

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG had its credit rating cut by Moody’s Investors Service, which said the German lender faces mounting challenges in carrying out its turnaround. The bank’s senior unsecured debt rating was lowered to Baa2 from Baa1, Moody’s said in a statement this week. That left the grade two levels above junk. The firm’s long-term deposit rating fell ...

  Bloomberg Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer James Gorman sounded a positive note about the Wall Street bank’s business, telling investors to “stay tuned” for better performance as markets recover. Speaking to Bloomberg Television in Beijing, where the firm is hosting its China summit, Gorman said a 6 percent return on equity in the first quarter was in “a very ...

  Bloomberg Deutsche Bank AG hired Thomas Piquemal as head of global mergers and acquisitions and chairman of corporate and investment banking in France. Piquemal, 47, most recently senior executive vice president for finance at French electricity utility Electricite de France SA, will be based in Paris and report to corporate and investment banking chief Jeff Urwin, Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank ...

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) warned that risks of financial-market turmoil have increased amid slower growth in emerging economies, weak bank profitability and the rise of populist movements across the 19-nation euro region. “A sharper-than-expected fall in Chinese growth could well lead to a synchronized downturn across other emerging market economies, particularly commodity exporting economies,” the ECB wrote ...

  BLOOMBERG UK banks are privately lobbying the Bank of England to pressure Swift into adopting new security measures that would make it more difficult for cyber criminals to target the global payments network, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions. The banks want the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) to install software that would ...

  Singapore / AFP Singapore’s central bank on Tuesday said it was kicking out Switzerland’s BSI Bank, which has been linked to a global money-laundering scandal that has embroiled neighbouring Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak. In the toughest legal action so far in the crisis rocking Malaysian state fund 1MDB, Switzerland also disclosed it had launched criminal proceedings against the ...

  Bloomberg Nigerian policy makers may be about to loosen their stranglehold on the nation’s currency. The central bank of Africa’s biggest economy will decide on Tuesday on whether to adjust borrowing as evidence mounts of a looming recession. Barclays Plc, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Renaissance Capital Ltd. are among banks predicting it will also introduce a de facto ...

  Reuters Jordan’s central bank said that it had auctioned its first-ever sale of Islamic bonds, or sukuk, a five-year 75 million dinars ($105.9 million) deal to help finance purchases by state utility firm National Electric Power Company. The sukuk, which used a cost-plus-profit arrangement known as murabaha, attracted 205 million dinars worth of bids paying a 3.5 percent profit ...