An Australian agriculture finance provider is suing insurer the Bond and Credit Company (BCC) for refusing to honour a claim for A$7.3mn owed by collapsed Dubai-based commodities trader Phoenix Commodities. The legal wrangle highlights the ongoing fallout from the demise of Phoenix, a trading conglomerate that reportedly owed US$1.2bn to creditors when it entered liquidation .
A coalition of banks last week committed themselves to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and adopting interim targets much sooner. But a glaring absence of banks from major polluting countries in the Asia Pacific and criticism of its conservative ambitions has undermined confidence in the alliance.
The Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was launched on April 21 by the United Nations Environment Program’s Finance Initiative and comprises 43 banks from 23 countries.
Hailed by former Bank of England governor and UN climate envoy Mark Carney as “the breakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needs”, the initiative joins a flurry of investor-led forums ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Scotland in November. A Net Zero Insurance Alliance is also in the offing.
The European Union’s proposed new scheme to impose levies on carbon polluting imports in a swathe of sectors risks “unfairly penalising” developing countries, a new report from the Centre for European Reform (CER) think tank says.
Last month, the European Parliament adopted a resolution backing the launch of a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) which will charge certain types of imports from “less climate-ambitious countries”.
The European Commission is now set to table legislation in the coming months, with the move seeking to prevent the risk of so-called “carbon leakage”.
As the EU works to go carbon neutral by 2050 as part of its broader Green Deal, the fear in Brussels is that heavy-polluting industries will simply move production to jurisdictions with laxer rules and undercut European firms through cheaper carbon-intensive imports.
Lee Si Ye, deputy managing director of Envy Group – a cluster of Singapore-based companies
accused by state police of defrauding investors – says in court documents seen by
GTR that the companies are “likely to become unable to pay their debts as they fall due”.
The scheme involved Envy Group companies purchasing nickel at a discount from Australia-based supplier Poseidon, which would then be sold onto other parties including BNP Paribas and Singapore-based trading company Raffemet, Lee says.
The majority of the receivables from those on-sales would be sold onto investors, who were offered returns of around 15%. In effect, Lee says, those investors were providing Envy with funds used to purchase nickel, with the opportunity to withdraw or roll over profits after 30 days.
Crédit Agricole CIB has signed its largest ever synthetic risk transfer (SRT) with the International Finance Corporation (IFC), as it seeks to expand its trade finance activities in emerging markets. The structured finance transaction will see the IFC provide a US$182mn guarantee on a US$4bn-equivalent reference portfolio composed mostly of Crédit Agricole CIB trade finance .