Bloomberg Asia’s rapacious thirst for liquefied natural gas is sucking supplies from surprising places. China to Japan and South Korea are paying top dollar for the super-chilled fuel. The pull is so strong that Norway’s Statoil ASA, which usually exports most of its LNG to Europe, is shipping a rare cargo east. It plans to send more. Asia gets most …

SEOUL / Reuters South Korea’s Korea Gas Corp has entered court-administered arbitration with Australian joint venture North West Shelf Gas seeking to settle a dispute over a liquefied natural gas (LNG) contract that expired in 2016. A spokesman for the state-run Korean firm, known as KOGAS, confirmed an arbitration process was under way but declined to give details. Woodside Petroleum, …

Bloomberg China has urged controlling investors in listed companies to boost their holdings and some mutual funds to limit equity selling this week, according to people familiar with the matter, as officials seek to stem the impact of the stock selloff. Over the weekend, the China Securities Regulatory Commission and other regulators sent informal directives to some major stockholders encouraging …

Bloomberg Investors actively abandoned the world’s biggest passive fund during the onset of market mayhem. The SPDR S&P 500 exchange-traded fund (ticker SPY) suffered a record $23.6 billion in outflows last week amid the worst momentum swing in history for the underlying U.S. equity benchmark. Outflows amounted to 8 percent of the fund’s total assets at the start of the …

Bloomberg A shock decision by Indian exchanges to cut ties with their offshore counterparts sent shares of Singapore Exchange Ltd. falling by the most in nine years and raised questions about how the world’s second-most populous nation will fit in with the global financial system. The National Stock Exchange of India Ltd., together with other Indian markets, said that they …

Bloomberg India’s regulator unearthed about $3.6 billion of bad loans in the books of the country’s biggest bank, amplifying questions about distress in the financial sector given underreporting by some rivals as well. State Bank of India said an audit by the central bank showed soured debt was about 232 billion rupees ($3.6 billion) higher than what the state-run lender …

Bloomberg Just 8 percent of cybersecurity heads at US financial firms report to the chief executive officer directly and more should do so to help facilitate decision-making, according to the Financial Services Information Sharing & Analysis Center. The industry group’s first-ever survey on the topic showed that 39 percent of chief information security officers report directly to the chief information …

Bloomberg Australia’s banks, rocked by years of scandals and wrongdoing, risk having further misconduct exposed as a powerful government-appointed inquiry into the nation’s financial industry starts. The yearlong Royal Commission will examine the nation’s banks, insurers, financial services providers and pension funds, and consider whether regulators have enough power to tackle misconduct. The first public hearings will focus on allegations …

Bloomberg Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, the state-rescued Italian bank, fell in Milan trading after it reported a fourth-quarter loss on weak revenue and restructuring costs. The shares were down 2.8 percent at 3.72 euros as of 9:55 a.m. The stock, which returned to trading on October 25 after an 10-month suspension, is now valued more than 43 …

Bloomberg Peter Selman, hired out of retirement by Deutsche Bank AG to turn around Wall Street’s worst-hit equities business, wants to tap universities rather than rivals to do so. “We certainly have holes to fill and we’re hiring,” Selman, an ex- Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner who joined the German lender in November, said in a phone interview. “But we’re …