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A commercial court recognized the dissolution of Mexico's Credito Real and ordered its judicial liquidation, the troubled payroll lender said in a filing yesterday, Reuters reported. Credito Real, reeling from a bond default, said in June it was aiming for an orderly restructuring of its debt. Mexico's stock exchange suspended the firm's listing last month after the company struggled to meet its financial obligations. Shares in Credito Real fell more than 95% between January 2022 and its suspension. The company's board resigned in June after it cut ties with restructuring and legal advisors. Credito Real in February defaulted on a 170 million Swiss franc ($183 million) bond, prompting credit rating cuts by S&P and Fitch Ratings and a debt restructuring process.

A federal bankruptcy court has frozen the assets of Three Arrows Capital, the once-prominent crypto hedge fund that managed as much as $10 billion in assets until it fell into liquidation last month, the Washington Post reported. In an emergency hearing Tuesday, Judge Martin Glenn of the Southern District of New York granted a motion allowing liquidators to “transfer, encumber, or otherwise dispose” of any Three Arrows Capital assets located in the United States. In addition, the court authorized subpoenas for the founders, whose whereabouts are unknown. The Singapore-based company, also known as 3AC, was founded a decade ago by Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, who both studied at Columbia University in New York City and worked for the same investment bank before making their names as crypto influencers and managers of a multibillion-dollar fund. It did not, however, survive the broader crypto market meltdown that has erased hundreds of billions in value this year. Bitcoin, the most valuable digital currency, is trading below $20,000, having shed more than 70 percent of its value since last fall. On June 27, crypto broker Voyager Digital said that Three Arrows Capital had not made payments on a loan worth more than $665 million. The same day, a court in the British Virgin Islands ordered the fund into liquidation. Four days later, 3AC filed for bankruptcy under chapter 15 of the U.S. bankruptcy code, which allows a foreign debtor to deal with their U.S. assets. The court-appointed liquidators — Russell Crumpler and Christopher Farmer of the global advisory firm Teneo — cited a “lack of cooperation to date” by Zhu and Davies in a July 8 filing, whose whereabouts they say are unknown. Though the fund’s lawyer, Christopher Anand Daniel of Singapore-based Advocatus Law, has been in contact, liquidators say, the co-founders have not begun to cooperate “in any meaningful manner.”

Embattled Scandinavian airline SAS and unions representing pilots will resume negotiations on Wednesday to try and agree a new labour deal to end a one-week strike, Reuters reported. SAS has canceled more than 1,200 flights since July 4 when talks with many of its pilots over a new collective bargaining agreement collapsed and they launched the crippling strike. "What has now happened is that we have asked the parties to gather in Stockholm from Wednesday," Swedish mediator Jan Sjolin said. Henrik Thyregod, head of the Danish pilots union told Reuters he was certain an outcome would be reached but was unsure of how long the negotiations would take. Spokespeople for SAS and the Norwegian and Swedish pilot unions also confirmed that the talks will resume but declined to elaborate on the content or expected outcome. The airline said on Monday it had informed mediators that it wishes to resume negotiations with the aim of "reaching a new collective agreement." The loss-making carrier has estimated the strike, now in its ninth day, is costing $10 million to $13 million a day.

Scandinavian airline SAS canceled almost 70% of its flights on Friday as a pilots strike stranded thousands of tourists overseas, Reuters reported. Some 181 flights, or 69% of those scheduled, were canceled on Friday, data from flight tracker FlightAware showed. SAS has been forced to cancel hundreds of flights since Monday when talks between the airline and pilots over a new collective bargaining agreement collapsed. The carrier, whose biggest owners are the Swedish and the Danish states, filed for chapter 11 protection in the United States this week. It held a first court hearing on Thursday in a process SAS expects will take up to a year. Since the talks broke down the only movement has been work toward an agreement between SAS and unions allowing the carrier to bring home stranded charter passengers booked on flights operated by SAS. A SAS spokeswoman said about 18 planes were set to repatriate such travellers on Friday while a negotiator for Dansk Metal, representing Danish pilots, said unions were still seeking assurances the planes would be used for no other purpose.

Unregulated lenders in Mexico that specialize in loans to low-income people grew at a breakneck pace over the past decade, until accounting irregularities at three Deloitte-audited firms threw the sector’s credibility into question, the Wall Street Journal reported. The three lenders — Crédito Real SAB de CV, AlphaCredit Capital SA de CV and Grupo Finmart — have discredited some financial statements as unreliable. All retained the same auditor for years: Deloitte Mexico, the Mexico City-based unit of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. Investors and customers are looking for answers about exactly what exactly went wrong, and a lack of financial transparency from the lenders has cooled foreign investment into once burgeoning Latin American microfinance companies that depend on capital markets to fund their businesses. Crédito Real plans to file for insolvency in Mexico and may potentially liquidate, according to people familiar with the matter, after investors pulled the plug in the wake of its accounting irregularities. Roughly half of the value of its loan portfolio, or around $1.1 billion, turned out to be unpaid interest, a number the company didn’t break out for years until it was included in a footnote to its 2020 financial statements. The company’s board resigned en masse this spring, and current management is mediating between the company’s creditors and its largest shareholder, Angel Romanos Berrondo, who founded the company in the 1990s. AlphaCredit last year wrote down the value of certain assets by about $200 million, equivalent to about half of its total loan portfolio. The lender hired a new auditor, revoked its 2018-20 financial statements as unreliable and placed a U.S. subsidiary in bankruptcy. About two years after attracting SoftBank Group Corp. as an investor, AlphaCredit is now broken up and is no longer issuing new loans.

Hundreds of SAS flights were canceled on Thursday as the airline wrestled with a strike by pilots at its main SAS Scandinavia arm, overshadowing a traffic surge during June, Reuters reported. Talks between the airline and pilots over a new collective bargaining agreement collapsed on Monday, prompting a strike which adds to travel chaos in Europe and deepens the financial crisis at SAS, which estimated it would ground half its flights. The troubled airline, whose biggest owners are the Swedish and the Danish states, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States on Tuesday. The first hearing was due to begin at 1400 GMT in New York with SAS expecting the process to take between nine and 12 months. Tuesday's traffic figures highlighted what SAS was now missing in the peak summer period, with the airline flying 1.9 passengers in June, a 220% increase on the year. Data from flight tracker FlightAware showed 202 flights, 66% of the airline's daily total, were cancelled on Thursday. The Swedish pilots union said that the pilot associations had proposed making an exception for several weeks to SAS in order to repatriate stranded charter passengers. Charter companies have warned thousands of people could be stranded unless a solution for their return flights, which were due to be operated by SAS, could be reached.

A day after its pilots went on strike, SAS, the Scandinavian airline, said on Tuesday that it had filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, the latest reverberation in a summer of turmoil for European airlines, the New York Times reported. SAS described the filing, made in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, as the “next step” in a reorganization that would address the money-losing airline’s financial difficulties, including cost reductions of more than $700 million. It said it was in discussions with potential lenders who could provide $700 million in financing to support operations through the chapter 11 process. It expected to emerge from the process in nine to 12 months. SAS, which is the national airline of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, said that it would continue flying, although on Monday it called the pilots’ strike “devastating” and warned that it could cause the cancellation of half of its flights, affecting about 30,000 passengers daily. On Monday, SAS canceled 51 percent of its flights, according to FlightAware. By midday on Tuesday, nearly 80 percent of its flights had been canceled. SAS’s stock price fell about 15 percent Tuesday, extending a 5 percent decline the day before.

Crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) is seeking protection from creditors in the United States under chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which allows foreign debtors to shield U.S. assets, according to a court filing on Friday, Reuters reported. Singapore-based 3AC is one of the highest-profile investors hit by the sharp sell-off in crypto markets and is being liquidated, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Representatives for 3AC filed a petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday, according to court documents. On Thursday, Singapore's financial regulator had accused embattled the fund of exceeding its assets threshold and providing false information.

Three Arrows Capital plunged deeper into financial turmoil Wednesday after a court in the British Virgin Islands ordered the crypto-focused hedge fund into liquidation following its failure to repay creditors as the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have nosedived, the Washington Post reported. The liquidation order comes after a high-profile notice of default: On Monday, crypto broker Voyager Digital announced that Three Arrows Capital had not made the required payments on a loan worth more than $665 million, paid partly in bitcoin. Two senior members of the global advisory firm Teneo have been appointed by the court to help manage the liquidation. In coming days, Teneo will have a website that will allow potential creditors of Three Arrows Capital to submit claims and receive more information about the insolvency. Three Arrows Capital was created in 2012 by Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, and is known for its bullish moves on crypto. But signs of trouble emerged in May when Su admitted publicly that his thesis about escalating crypto prices was “regrettably wrong.” Then, in a cryptic tweet earlier this month, he said that, “We are in the process of communicating with relevant parties and fully committed to working this out,” without offering relevant details. Days later, the Financial Times reported that Three Arrows Capital had failed to meet demands from lenders to show extra funds after its wagers on crypto had gone bust.