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Canada’s Jupiter Resources, Inc., the Calgary-based natural gas exploration and production company owned by Apollo Global Management LLC, on Monday skipped an interest payment to bondholders amid talks about a debt restructuring, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The company said yesterday that it skipped a $46 million interest payment on unsecured notes due in 2022 and entered a 30-day grace period. The additional time allows Jupiter to avoid a debt default as it continues restructuring talks with a group of bondholders. The bondholder group includes private-equity owner Apollo itself, the company disclosed yesterday. The recent downturn in natural gas prices has put strains on the company’s cash flows, which have been negative since 2017, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

Nordic budget airline Primera Air has become the latest European carrier to go bust, telling staff that all flights were being halted and leaving thousands of passengers stranded, Reuters reported. Primera Air, which is Icelandic-owned but based in Copenhagen, began in 2003 and has served 97 destinations in more than 20 countries. The airline announced last month that it planned to launch routes from Madrid to New York, Boston and Toronto next year at an introductory price of 149 euros ($172) each way. It also announced in September plans for direct long-haul flights from Frankfurt to New York, Boston, Toronto and Montreal from next year. The collapse comes exactly a year after Britain’s Monarch Airlines went under after falling victim to intense competition for flights and a weaker pound. Air Berlin, Germany’s second-largest airline, filed for bankruptcy protection in August 2017. Primera was forced to cancel flights earlier this year, citing delays in receiving aircraft from Airbus, but has faced growing complaints about poor service and late refunds.

India’s Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Ltd. has sought to shield itself from being dragged to bankruptcy court as it tries to restructure its borrowings in the wake of a string of defaults that have sent shock waves through local markets, Bloomberg News reported. The company, which has missed more than five debt payments since August, filed an application with the National Company Law Tribunal seeking some accommodations for itself and 40 units under the Companies Act, according to an exchange filing. The troubled infrastructure lender is attempting to reach a compromise with creditors outside the insolvency courts. As it is a systemically important non-bank lender, defaults by IL&FS group have rattled India’s financial markets this month, with mutual funds marking down investments, lenders concerned about further delinquencies and confidence in the shadow-lending industry plummeting. Worries over contagion have led to a collapse in the stock prices of some non-banking financial companies and made bond sales tougher even as authorities pledged to support local markets.

Turkish companies will no longer be required to count foreign-currency losses when assessing whether to file for bankruptcy, according to a legal change introduced at the weekend, a move that could deepen concern about private sector debt, Reuters reported. The move is the latest government measure to help companies squeezed by a sell-off in the Turkish lira this year, and highlights the difficulty firms, and banks, face in what analysts say is likely to be a wave of debt restructuring. For years Turkish companies have borrowed in hard currency, drawn by lower interest rates. But a 40 percent decline in the lira this year — triggered by investor concerns about President Tayyip Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism and the lack of central bank independence — has driven up the cost of servicing that debt. JPMorgan estimates that Turkey’s private sector has around $146 billion in external debt maturing in the year to July 2019.

President Trump’s economic conflict with China is set to escalate this week, as the administration plans to unveil fresh tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese products entering the U.S. and Beijing debates new ways to retaliate against U.S. corporations doing business in China, the Wall Street Journal reported. The threats from both sides of the Pacific risk upending a fragile new diplomatic initiative — led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and supported by top U.S. financial and business executives — to see if they can broker negotiations aimed at staving off a new round of tit-for-tat penalties. As part of that initiative, the Chinese government over the weekend was completing plans for a top economic policy official to visit Washington, D.C., in the next few days to lay the groundwork for a trip by Vice Premier Liu He the following week. Liu is expected to see Mnuchin, and possibly Trump. But Chinese officials said that if Trump carries out his plans to announce the fresh tariffs early this week, then those talks could get scuttled. Read more. (Subscription required.) 

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