Volvo Cars on Wednesday said it was recalling nearly 2.2 million cars built between 2006 and 2019 to address a potential issue with cables attached to their front seat belts in the automaker’s biggest ever recall.

Volvo said it would contact owners of the affected models, such as the V60, V70 and XC60, asking them to contact their Volvo retailer to have their cars repaired free of charge.

The carmaker, owned by China’s Geely, said it had not received any reports of accidents or injuries connected to the flaw and that the move was preventative to avoid any possible issues in the future.

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German logistics company DHL on Wednesday said it has temporarily suspended picking up import shipments from China to India, after border tensions between the countries led to clearance delays.

According to a BloomberQuint report, another prominent freight transporter FedEx Corp has also suspended shipments, adding that the company is facing backlogs beyond its control.

A DHL representative confirmed to Reuters that the recent delay in customs clearance of cargo into India caused the shipment company's DHL Express India unit to temporarily suspend pickups from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. 

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The European Central Bank is lowering the bar for bank mergers in the euro zone, hoping to encourage an elusive wave of consolidation in a sector plagued by low profits and unresolved issues inherited from the last financial crisis.

In a guide published on Wednesday, the ECB clarified that merged entities won't necessarily be asked for extra capital and will be allowed to use their own accounting models as well as any paper profit that occurs when an asset is bought below its book value.

These were some of the concerns flagged by bankers in recent years when evaluating mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the euro zone.

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The head of human resources at sportswear giant Adidas has resigned amid a row over the firm's corporate culture and lack of diversity.

Karen Parkin a British citizen who had worked at Adidas for more than 20 years.

Her exit follows protests by Adidas staff over a comment she reportedly made at an internal meeting last year.

Global brands face increasing pressure to take action over racial equality after the death of George Floyd.

In a statement issued by the world’s second largest sportswear maker Ms Parkin said that she had always stood against racism and had decided to retire and pave the way for change.

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Two leading UK firms, the insurer Aviva and the Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) have become the latest to put a hold on advertising on Facebook.

They join Ford, Adidas, HP, Coca Cola, Unilever and Starbucks, which have all acted in response to how the social network deals with hate speech.

The Stop Hate for Profit campaign claims that Facebook is not doing enough to remove hateful content.

Facebook has said it wants to be a force for good.

Ahead of the latest developments, the tech firm's UK director Steve Hatch told BBC that there was no profit in content that is hateful.

Aviva said they regularly review which social media platforms they use and have taken this moment to pause and reassess Aviva's use of Facebook for advertising in the UK.

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Ratings agency Fitch on Tuesday warned that Government debt burdens across sub-Saharan Africa are rising at a faster pace and to higher levels than elsewhere in emerging markets, heightening the risk of further rating downgrades and defaults.

Emerging markets have been battered by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, with a coinciding oil price rout adding to the pain for smaller and often riskier developing countries, many focussed on crude exports and having few fiscal or monetary buffers.

Fitch predicted that the median of government debt-to-GDP for the 19 sovereigns it rated in the region would rise to 71% by end-2020 from 26% in 2012, while the median debt ratio across other emerging markets is expected to climb to 57%.

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The Bank of Ghana in its last auction of forex in June, received 33% of the total amount of dollars dealers bid for.

The total bids were also about three times lower than the figure offered by the dealers.

For the last auction in June 2020, the Forex Auction Committee of the Bank of Ghana accepted $25,000,000 out of the $75,500,000 offered by forex dealers.

This means that the central bank rejected $50, 500,000 out of the amount bid for.

The $25,000,000 is also the amount the regulator sought to accept for purposes of controlling the supply of dollars.

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Kenya’s economy grew by 4.9% in the first three months of this year slowing down from its previous growth of 5.5% same period last year.

According to the East African nation’s statistics office, Kenya was lightly spared the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic during the period, except for the hospitality sector which has been hit hard.

The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics says the hospitality industry shrunk by nearly 10% due to massive cancellations and suspension of international travel as well as an unprecedented closure of hotels and other tourist sites, as the country raced against time to contain the spread of coronavirus.

Kenya’s major trade partners such as China, the European Union and the United States suffered far reaching effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and this meant, export earnings were immediately reduced.

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The Central Bank of Nigeria has said it is probing some dealers for allegedly procuring foreign currencies for the purpose of importing items, which had been designated as invalid for the Nigerian foreign exchange market.

The Federal High Court in Lagos ordered that the bank accounts of the suspects should be frozen for 180 days to allow for investigation by the apex bank while following an ex parte application by the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, on Monday.

Emefiele told the court that the illegal activities of the dealers had continually undermined the CBN’s efforts to maintain a stable foreign exchange regime, which causes significant economic and financial instability to the Nigerian economy.

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According to the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Mr Godwin Emefiele, the non-performing loan ratio of the Nigerian banking sector dropped to 6.6 per cent at the end of April 2020 from 11 per cent in April 2019.

In a report recently released by the CBN on the last Monetary Policy meeting, Emefiele said the observed growth in credit illustrates the continued potency of the bank’s Loan to Deposit Ratio policy and the need to sustain credit flows to the private sector, especially at this critical time when the economy needs to indefatigably support its productive machinery.

He said the reduction in the NPLs underlined the CBN’s continued drive to de-risk lending.

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