Bloomberg The UK power market is showing signs of strain. For the fourth time this winter National Grid Plc warned that the buffer needed to ensure security of supply and keep the lights on was too small. While the UK has made swift progress on switching from fossil fuels to renewables, this is the downside to cleaning up its energy …

Bloomberg South Sudan’s main electricity provider will stop supplying power to the national grid after the government failed to allocate the foreign exchange it needs for operations. The Ezra Construction and Development Group supplies 33 megawatts to the Juba Electric Distribution, for which it is paid in foreign exchange. The government is contractually obliged to allocate Jedco hard currency as …

Bloomberg Rising corporate debt and the prospect of further Covid-19 lockdowns pose a systemic risk to France’s financial system that may rise in the coming months, according to the country’s central bank. Debts of non-financial companies are now the greatest vulnerability in the system, the Bank of France said in its semi-annual review of financial risks. While the second lockdown …

Bloomberg The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) said it’s investigating an illegal breach of a third-party file sharing service used to share and store some sensitive information. While the breach has been contained, the nature and extent of the information that potentially had been accessed is being determined and may have included some commercially and personally sensitive data, Governor …

Bloomberg India’s Home First Finance Co. is seeking to raise as much as 2.5 billion rupees ($34 million) from an initial public offering (IPO) in the next few weeks as the mortgage provider backed by Warburg Pincus LLC taps rising demand for housing. The country’s first non-bank mortgage lender to sell shares in over two years will offload about a 25% …

Bloomberg Overseas-Chinese Banking Corp. (OCBC) named Helen Wong as Singapore’s first female bank chief executive officer (CEO), putting her in charge of leading the island state’s second-largest lender through a severe economic downturn brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Wong, 59, is replacing Samuel Tsien who will retire in April after running OCBC since 2012, the bank said in a …

Bloomberg South Africa’s volatile currency caught Citigroup Inc. in a wrong-way bet within a day. The New York-based lender recommended a short-dollar position versus the rand, betting the South African currency would strengthen along with emerging-market peers as uncertainty around fiscal stimulus in the US weighed on the dollar. Instead, the rand plunged more than 2% as traders fretted about …

Bloomberg Morgan Stanley’s investment management arm boosted a stake in Bitcoin vehicle MicroStrategy Inc. to more than 10% late last year. The bank unit held 792,627 shares of MicroStrategy by the end of December, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The 10.9% stake had a value of roughly $420 million based on the day’s closing …

Bloomberg Credit Suisse Group AG has cut relationships with a number of Venezuela’s wealthy as it weighs the risk of doing business with politically-exposed clients in the sanctions-hit country. Switzerland’s second-largest lender has cut assets it manages for the nation’s wealthy by more than half over the past few years, to about $2 billion, according to people familiar with the …

Bloomberg The United Kingdom is set to reverse a ban on trading in Swiss shares following its exit from the European Union (EU). The Treasury plans to put legislation to lawmakers in the coming days that will take effect three weeks later if approved, according to a spokesman. The story was first reported by the Financial Times. “Once in force, …