Banking

Bangalore / AFP A group of Indian banks has petitioned a court seeking the arrest of corporate honcho Vijay Mallya, the beleaguered businessman accused of defaulting on hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, a lawyer said. Heavily indebted Mallya has been deep in a financial fight over his now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines, which owes more than $1 billion to a ...

ABUJA / BLOOMBERG Nigeria’s biggest manufacturing body has lobbied the central bank to sell dollars directly to its members, bypassing commercial lenders as it looks to counter a shortage of foreign-currency it says threatens thousands of jobs in Africa’s largest oil producer. The Manufacturers’ Association of Nigeria, which has about 2,700 members, proposed weekly auctions of dollars to manufacturing businesses ...

Bloomberg Banca Popolare di Vicenza SCpA’s owners approved a plan to raise as much as 1.8 billion euros ($2 billion) in an initial public offering and transform the cooperative lender into a joint-stock firm, a crucial step toward ensuring its survival. The proposals passed at a meeting in Vicenza, Italy, after the European Central Bank (ECB) warned that without a ...

Zurich / AFP A fragile calm in global financial markets has given way to all-out turbulence, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) said, warning of a ‘gathering storm’ which has long been brewing. In its previous quarterly report, watched closely by investors, the BIS — which is known as the central bank of central banks — warned of an ‘uneasy ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank (ECB) will almost certainly announce new stimulus measures at its policy meeting next week, analysts said, as eurozone inflation turned negative and the economic outlook continues to cloud over. After disappointing financial markets with what were widely to perceived as half-hearted measures in December, ECB chief Mario Draghi will announce bolder policy moves this time ...

Yangon / AFP Four more foreign banks have been given preliminary approval to operate in Myanmar, state media reported on Sunday, the latest government attempt to attract overseas investment to the emergent nation. Myanmar’s banking system was closed for decades to outside competition under junta rule, leaving the country laden with a creaking financial infrastructure and a populace deeply suspicious ...

Bloomberg Negative interest-rate policies currently in use by central banks around the world have worked through their respective systems in much the same way as positive rates, though it’s not known how far below zero that would continue to be the case, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said. In its quarterly report published on Sunday, the Basel-based “central bank ...

BLOOMBERG Banks that finance their operations abroad with wholesale, cross-border or cross-currency funding are amplifying credit crunches, while those relying on local deposits remain a more stable provider of loans, economists at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said. Those banks whose foreign subsidiaries lent money raised from local savers and companies shrank their balance sheets less than those relying ...

Bloomberg Wall Street giants such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. would face new limits on credit exposure to other large financial firms under a Federal Reserve plan aimed at ensuring banks won’t take others with them if they fail. The proposal, which would limit such exposures to 15 percent of a lender’s Tier ...

Bloomberg Banks’ options for gauging the risk of incurring losses from events such as fraud, cybercrime and litigation are set to shrink as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision tries to stop firms gaming the rules. The global regulator, whose members include the US Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China, proposed scrapping an ‘unduly complex’ internal model-based method ...