Banking

NEW DELHI / AFP A group of Indian banks rejected on Thursday embattled businessman Vijay Mallya’s offer to repay $600 million in unpaid loans, less than half of what his defunct airline owes them. The banks told the Supreme Court in New Delhi that they wanted the 60-year-old flamboyant entrepreneur to return to India so they could negotiate with him ...

MADRID / AP A union representing bank workers says Spain’s biggest bank is planning to lay off 1,200 workers as part of a restructuring plan that will also shutter more than 400 branches. The UGT union says Banco Santander SA’s plan calls for half of the employees to take early retirement and receive 70 percent of their annual pay. UGT ...

BLOOMBERG Chase Bank Kenya Ltd. shareholders are committed to recapitalising the lender placed under receivership to re-open the institution “as quickly as possible,” the central bank Governor Patrick Njoroge said. The closely held East African lender went into statutory management on Thursday to protect it from its creditors a day after two executives stepped down following the restatements of its ...

Bloomberg Asia’s top private banks posted their first drop in assets under management and number of relationship managers in at least three years as the region’s economic growth slowed and mounting regulatory pressure forced them to reject some clients. Total assets at the 20 biggest banks in Asia fell 4.2 percent to $1.47 trillion last year, as the number of ...

Budapest / Reuters Hungary’s state-owned MKB Bank posted a loss of 76.4 billion forints ($277.3 million) last year, down from 148.1 billion in 2014, as the costs of spinning off a large chunk of distressed debt still pushed it deep into the red, it said on Wednesday. Last year MKB disposed of a gross 213 billion forints worth of bad ...

Warsaw / Reuters Polish bluechip lender Alior Bank plans to raise up to 2.2 billion zlotys ($587 million) from a rights issue of shares to finance its flagged takeover of local rival BPH and strengthen its capital base, it said on Wednesday. Alior, controlled via a 25.2 percent stake by Polish state-run insurer PZU, wants its shareholders to approve the ...

Sydney / AFP Westpac Bank has vowed to “vigorously defend” itself against allegations it manipulated the interbank lending rate after Australia’s corporate regulator launched legal action against the financial giant, the second case in a lengthy investigation. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said it began legal action against Westpac in the federal court for manipulating a key market ...

Muscat / Reuters Oman’s central bank has increased the maximum amount of government securities which banks can hold to 45 percent of their net worth from 30 percent, central bank and commercial banking sources said. The move will make it easier for the government to sell debt as it steps up bond issues to finance a big budget deficit caused ...

New Delhi / AFP India’s central bank on Tuesday cut its key interest rate to a five-year low of 6.5 percent citing a dip in inflation, and signalled there could be further rate cuts to come. In a widely expected move, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said it would lower the benchmark repo rate, the level at which it ...

Bloomberg France is planning to join the Netherlands in taking steps toward greater transparency in the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) 80 billion euros-a-month ($91 billion) quantitative-easing (QE) programme, according to a person with direct knowledge of the plans. In the first disclosure of its kind in 13 months of QE, the Dutch Central Bank has listed price and demand figures ...