• Mining company seeks cash equivalent to current market value
• After five years of losses, Sentula is overhauling business

Sentula Mining Ltd. has identified assets that could be sold to recover some of the 383 million rand ($30 million) in civil damages being sought from a former director, the first significant progress in the case since the amount was awarded more than six years ago, according to a person familiar with the matter.

It’s not yet clear how much of the money can be recouped, the person said, asking not to be identified as the information hasn’t been publicly announced.  The shares have rallied 31 percent this month…

A little over a year ago, the private equity titan Stephen A. Schwarzman sat down with Mohammed bin Salman, the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia and chairman of the kingdom’s largest sovereign wealth fund, in hopes of expanding their relationship.

Mr. Schwarzman’s company, the Blackstone Group, already counted Prince bin Salman’s Public Investment Fund as a major client. But the American financier now had a bold new idea: Court Saudi money to invest in projects like tunnels, bridges, airports and other sorely needed infrastructure improvements, predominantly in the United States…

Big Payoff After Blackstone Courted a Saudi Prince

If you stop and think for a minute about how banking actually works, you can’t help but conclude what an extraordinary business it really is and how lucky big banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorganChase are to be at the top of it.

In 2016, these three financial institutions together raked in $65 billion in net income, which is after paying out a total of $75 billion or so in compensation and benefits to their employees. This does not appear to be an industry suffering in the least…

Why Should the Big Banks Get Free Money?

The Trump administration is considering moving responsibility for overseeing more than $1 trillion in student debt from the Education Department to the Treasury Department, a switch that would radically change the system that helps 43 million students finance higher education.

The potential change surfaced in a scathing resignation memo sent late Tuesday night by James Runcie, the head of the Education Department’s federal student aid program. Mr. Runcie, an Obama-era holdover, was appointed in 2011 and reappointed in 2015. He cut short his term, which was slated to run until 2020, after clashing with the Trump administration and Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, over this proposal and other issues…

• World Economic Forum study calculates savings worldwide
• U.S. shortfall grows $3 trillion a year, report finds

Longer life spans and disappointing investment returns will help create a $400 trillion retirement-savings shortfall in about three decades, a figure more than five times the size of the global economy, according to a World Economic Forum report.

That includes a $224 trillion gap among six large pension-savings systems: the U.S., U.K., Japan, Netherlands, Canada and Australia, according to the report issued Friday. China and India account for the rest…

World’s Major Economies to Come up $400 Trillion Short on Retirement Savings

Democratic lawmakers asked Deutsche Bank AG to hand over its findings on two politically charged matters — its banking on behalf of now-President Donald Trump and trades from the bank’s Moscow operation that helped move some $10 billion out of Russia.

Representative Maxine Waters of California and four other Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee asked the Frankfurt-based lender for its internal reportabout its conduct in the Russian “mirror trading” scandal. They also asked for any internal review of Trump’s business dealings with the bank, descriptions of which have surfaced in news reports…

• TD, BMO report home loan balances shrink from first quarter
• RBC annual mortgage growth was weakest since start of 2015

Canadian mortgage growth is slowing as the country’s policy makers step up efforts to cool overheated housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto.

With four of Canada’s biggest banks reporting second-quarter results, the trend shows decelerating growth in home loan portfolios and, in some cases, shrinkage. It’s a welcome sign for officials struggling to curb house prices in two of the nation’s largest cities. The easing follows federal government moves in October to tighten mortgage insurance rules and other measures while opening the door to shift risks of defaulting mortgages to banks…

• Overheating risks rise in housing markets of smaller cities
• Buyers locked out of home cities seize opportunities elsewhere

When a 59-year-old accountant in Shanghai wanted to invest for her looming retirement, she bought two cheap apartments — on the other side of the country.

“When friends told me about a chance to buy properties in Xishuangbanna, I thought ‘why not?”’ said Yuan Junxi, talking of the steamy, subtropical region in Yunnan province, bordering Laos and Myanmar. “No buying limits; cheap, easy mortgages; and maybe property prices will jump over there too.”…

• Ponzi investors are awaiting payouts from $4 billion pot
• Cash for victims came from Jeffry Picower and JPMorgan

A firm hired by the U.S. to distribute $4 billion to victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme has racked up $38.8 million in billings over four years. The investors are still waiting for their first checks, though.

The Justice Department disclosed its payments to Richard Breeden, the Madoff Victim Fund administrator, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Bloomberg News. Breeden’s fees, which are being paid from cash in the fund, cover his work through 2016…

By the end of 2017, more than half of the company’s guestrooms in Las Vegas will have been upgraded. The renovation is expected to be complete during the second quarter of 2018.

Caesars Entertainment Corp. is launching a $90 million revamp of 1,270 guestrooms at Flamingo Las Vegas. The makeover is expected to be complete during the second quarter of 2018…

Caesars Launches $90M Makeover at Flamingo Las Vegas

• Public Investment Fund may eventually control over $2 trillion
• Saudi fund invested $3.5 billion in Uber Technologies in 2016

Saudi Arabia plans to expand its sovereign wealth fund into the world’s largest. The kingdom took a huge step toward that goal on Saturday when it signed billions of dollars of deals with Blackstone Group LP and SoftBank Group Corp.

The Public Investment Fund, or PIF, is at the center of Saudi Arabia’s efforts to diversify revenue away from oil under an economic transformation plan known as Vision 2030. The fund could eventually control more than $2 trillion, according to Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The sale of a less than 5 percent stake in oil giant Aramco to the public will provide funds for investment…

The facility will be located in an area of the metro with significant population growth and will be completed by the end of the second quarter of 2018.

Jernigan Capital Inc. has closed on a $9.2 million self-storage development investment in Tampa, Fla., selecting Phillips Development & Realty to build the proposed 70,888-square-foot facility.

The project will be located in an area of Tampa with significant population growth, namely on Falkenburg Road, near the Selmon Expressway. The development will be less than a mile from Top Golf and Bass Pro Shop as well as Westfield Brandon Shopping Centre, a high-end shopping mall with national retailers and restaurants…

For years, Citigroup employees feared that millions of dollars the bank was moving to Mexico might be suspicious. Yet in many cases, the bank did not alert regulators or step up its monitoring for money laundering, federal prosecutors said Monday.

Even as the Citigroup unit Banamex USA was growing to dominate remittances from the United States to Mexico, the bank did not properly safeguard its systems from being infiltrated by drug money and other illicit funds, prosecutors said…

Citigroup Agrees to $97.4 Million Settlement in Money Laundering Inquiry

• Firm ‘just leapfrogged’ most of infrastructure world: analyst
• Fund could benefit ‘significantly’ from Trump’s spending plan

Shares of Blackstone Group LP rose to the highest in 18 months after the private equity firm laid out plans for a $40 billion infrastructure fund.

The stock jumped as much as 7.1 percent Monday to $31.99, the highest since November 2015. It traded at $31.64 as of 11:06 a.m. in New York.

The luxury retail destination, developed and owned by Whitman Family Development for more than five decades, will add roughly 340,000 square feet.

Bal Harbour Shops, the renowned 511,400-square-foot luxury retail destination in Bal Harbour, Fla., is on the verge of a $400 million makeover. This week, the Bal Harbour Village council gave the long-awaited final green light for Whitman Family Development, owner and developer of the 52-year-old The Shops, to increase the size of the open-air shopping center to approximately 860,000 square feet…

Bal Harbour Shops to Undergo $400M Expansion

The Education Department on Friday took up an Obama-era plan to streamline federal student loan servicing by moving to a new, single platform for managing the loans of 43 million borrowers.

The department had indicated it might jettison the previous administration’s initiative, which was intended to simplify a system that consumer advocates have complained is overly complex and rife with poor customer service.

Choosing a single vendor to manage the loans also carries risk, as that entity would construct the most visible online government portal since the Affordable Care Act program website, HealthCare.gov…

Education Dept. Keeps Obama Plan to Streamline Loan System

Stream Data Centers was tapped to develop the 56,000 square-foot-building by the end of this year. Upon completion, the center will incorporate two utility feeds from two separate substations designed to support 2.4MW of IT data load.

Stream Data Centers agreed to lead the construction work at the latest U.S. Bank data center located in Chaska, Minn. The single-story, 56,000-square-foot facility is expected to cost $250 million to build, and should be operational by the end of this year.

Upon completion, the center will incorporate two separate substations designed to support 2.4 MW of IT data load. The concept for the data center combines structurally enhanced buildings, independent infrastructure and high-quality operations…

As President Trump begins his first presidential trip abroad in Saudi Arabia, an investment company run by one of his top supporters, the billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, has secured an enormous investment from the Middle Eastern kingdom.

The company, Blackstone, which Mr. Schwarzman helped found, said on Saturday that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had committed $20 billion to a new investment fund aimed at infrastructure projects, primarily in the United States.

The commitment is about half of the capital Blackstone plans to raise for the fund. All told, including potential borrowed money, the new fund could invest more than $100 billion in infrastructure projects, the company said in its statement…

• Apple, Qualcomm and Saudis are backing new tech fund
• Son’s spending spree may inflate valuations, crimp returns

When Masayoshi Son was a boy growing up on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, he kept a notebook to scribble down new inventions he hoped to create one day. Today, the SoftBank founder has almost $100 billion to invest on making the next big thing a reality.

• Investors include Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Apple, Sharp
• Fund targets $100 billion with final close within six months

SoftBank Group Corp. and Saudi Arabia formally announced the first round of capital commitments for the largest-ever technology investment fund, as founder Masayoshi Son seeks to accelerate his financing of cutting-edge technologies and startups.

More than $93 billion has been secured from backers led by the Japanese company and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, SoftBank said in a statement Saturday. Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Co., Apple Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Foxconn Technology Group and Sharp Corp. are also investing, and SoftBank aims to reach $100 billion with a final close within six months. Mubadala committed $15 billion, according to a separate statement…

China Hengshi Foundation Co. is locating new operations in Richland County. The facility is expected to create a little under 50 jobs.

Fiberglass fabric provider China Hengshi Foundation Co. plans to locate its new manufacturing operation in Columbia, S.C. The company will occupy a former Boozer Lumber Truss industrial space. After an $11.1 million investment, 48 jobs will be created at the 111,000-square-foot facility. The Coordinating Council for Economic Development has approved job development credits related to this project.

The 37 logistics facilities and nine office assets are located in key markets including Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver, the Inland Empire and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The JLL Capital Markets team did double duty on the sale of an $854.5 million logistics and office portfolio, completing the transactions of 46 assets in 12 states and securing $475.5 million in acquisition financing.

Brookfield-sponsored private equity funds purchased both portfolios consisting of 37 assets across 7.6 million square feet in logistics facilities and nine assets totaling 1.1 million square feet of office space from TA Realty. The transaction, first announced in early April by TA Realty, includes assets in key metro areas such as Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Orlando, Washington, D.C., and the Inland Empire and Bay Area in California…

• Asian funds are snapping up collateralized loan obligations
• Lower-rated CLO slices have outperformed, but some see risks

Asia’s yield-hungry investors have a lot riding on the financial engineers of Wall Street.

Faced with near record-low interest rates at home, money managers in Korea, Japan and China have been piling into complex and increasingly risky structured loan products in America. Their investments in collateralized loan obligations — including the high-yield “equity’’ tranches most exposed to defaults — have helped drive a doubling of issuance in 2017…

Risky and Complex U.S. Loan Wagers Are Red Hot in Low-Yield Asia

The four buildings are located on a contiguous 10.3-acre site in Mount Prospect, Ill., and offer a total of 190,000 square feet of warehouse space.

Clear Height Prospect, the owner of an industrial listing in Mount Prospect, Ill., tapped Avison Young as the exclusive marketing agency for the four-building portfolio. Erik Foster and Mike Wilson, both principals with Avison Young and members of the firm’s National Industrial Capital Markets Group, will lead the marketing efforts on behalf of the seller.

The assets sit on a contiguous 10.3-acre parcel located just north of the Chicago O’Hare International Airport and are 97 percent leased…

• Real posts biggest decline since January 1999; stocks tumble
• The so-called country risk surges most since June 2013

Brazil’s real, stocks and bonds tumbled as a fresh political crisis ensnared President Michel Temer and threatened to derail an agenda designed to pull Latin America’s largest economy out of its deepest recession on record.

Trading on the Ibovespa briefly came to a halt Thursday, sinking the most since 2008, with state-owned companies from Petroleo Brasileiro SA to Banco do Brasil SA among the worst losses. The real posted its biggest slide since 1999 even after the central bank intervened to support the currency. The premium investors demand to own the nation’s sovereign bonds rather than U.S. Treasuries jumped the most since June 2013…

• Brokers resume business ties with new company directors
• Mortgage lender still seeks financing to swap pension credit

The black sheep of Canada’s mortgage industry is starting to see support from the flock.

Even as Home Capital Group Inc. issues warnings about the company’s ability to stay in business, a growing number of financial firms, brokers and money managers are backing the company. It now remains to be seen if the support will be enough for the mortgage lender to survive without a backstop from the country’s biggest banks.

SAN FRANCISCO — Bill Maris surprised many people in August when he decided to step down from GV, the huge venture capital fund associated with Google — and left many wondering what he would do next.

Now, he is unveiling his new effort.

Mr. Maris announced on Tuesday that he has opened a new fund, Section 32, with about $150 million under management. It will invest in a variety of industries, from health care to agriculture technology…

After Leaving Google, Bill Maris Is Set to Open New Fund

The solar facility, spread across 887 acres, will generate enough energy to power about 15,000 Texas homes. The city of Garland, Texas signed a 15-year power purchase agreement to acquire the facility’s power and associated renewable energy credits.

Southern Co. subsidiary Southern Power announced the beginning of operations at the 102-megawatt Lamesa Solar Facility in Dawson County, Texas. The project is the company’s third large-scale solar farm operating in the state.

Lamesa Solar consists of approximately 410,000 tracking polycrystalline solar panels on 887 acres and generates sufficient energy to meet the needs of roughly 15,000 Texas homes. The city of Garland, Texas signed a 15-year power purchase agreement to acquire its power and associated renewable energy credits, which it may keep or sell…

• ETFs in high-yield, emerging markets were popular buys, sells
• iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond was top purchase

The most active bets among the largest U.S. college endowments in the first quarter were exchange-traded funds, underscoring a move toward cheap and passive investment strategies.

Four of the five largest public purchases were ETFs, accounting for over $1.2 billion traded, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The biggest bet was on iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF, with Harvard University’s endowment leading the way. The Ivy League school added to its position, making it the fund’s biggest publicly traded holding…

LONDON — Nearly nine years after a government bailout during the financial crisis, the Lloyds Banking Group is fully private again.

Lloyds — one of Britain’s four largest lenders — said on Wednesday that it had returned to private ownership after the British government sold its final stake.

The sale is a major milestone for Lloyds and comes five months after the lender made a big bet on the British economy, agreeing to buy Bank of America’s British credit card business for about $2.4 billion…

U.K. Government Sells Final Stake in Lloyds Banking Group

• Growing share of car loans 90 days late or more, N.Y. Fed says
• Strong borrowers make up bigger slice of new loan originations

Lenders are tightening the spigot on new auto loans, making it harder for U.S. consumers with weak credit to buy a car, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show.

Krista Patterson has joined the firm’s Transactional Department, where she will focus on negotiating and drafting leasing, financing and joint venture agreements for commercial transactions.

Manhattan-based full-service real estate law firm Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman LLP welcomed Krista Patterson as its newest associate. She will report to the Transactional Department Head & Partner Daniel Altman. Her responsibilities will include focusing on commercial transactions, negotiating and drafting leasing, conveyancing, financing and joint venture agreements.

High student debt, rising home prices and tight credit swing loans to best borrowers

Want a home loan these days? Increasingly, your credit needs to be almost perfect.

Mortgages continued to concentrate among the least risky U.S. households in the first quarter with almost 61 percent of new home loans going to borrowers with a credit risk score of 760 or above, according to a report published Wednesday by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. That’s a record in a data series that goes back to 2003, when the share was around 30 percent.

• Average earnings adjusted for inflation decline by 0.2%
• Wages under pressure despite lowest unemployment since 1975

It looks like those hard times the Bank of England warned about are here already.

Even as unemployment dropped to its lowest in more than four decades last quarter, U.K. workers saw their real earnings fall for the first time in 2 1/2 years, data from the Office for National Statistics showed on Wednesday. That’s particularly problematic for a nation that has relied on buoyant consumers to keep spending, not least as it enters negotiations to leave the world’s largest trading bloc…

The new Thunder Ranch wind facility will have a total installed capacity of almost 300 megawatts and is expected to begin operations by the end of 2017.

Enel S.p.A., through its subsidiary Enel Green Power North America Inc. (EGPNA) has started construction of the 298-megawatt Thunder Ranch wind farm located in Garfield, Kay and Noble Counties, Okla. The facility will be supported by long-term power purchase agreements for the sale of power and renewable energy credits.