By Karin Strohecker

LONDON (Reuters) – The Maldives has chosen U.S.-headquartered Centerview Partners to be its adviser on debt matters as the country battles to stave off a financial crisis, two sources familiar with the situation said.

Concerns have grown in recent months that the island nation could become the first country to default on Islamic sovereign debt as the government faces a $500-million Sukuk maturing in 2026 and dwindling foreign currency reserves.

According to the World Bank, the country’s total public and publicly guaranteed debt stood at $8.2 billion, or equivalent to 116% of GDP, in the first quarter of this year.

About half of that is external debt, with a big chunk owed to regional rivals China and India, which have extended $1.37 billion and $124 million in loans, respectively, World Bank data shows.

Both countries have in recent weeks shored up their support to the Maldives, easing investor concerns about a debt crisis and helping to bolster its international bonds.

Beijing signed a financial cooperation agreement with the Maldives in September to strengthen trade and investment. India subscribed to a $50-million Maldives Treasury bill last month and said in October it had approved currency swap deals worth more than $750 million.

The Maldives’ sole international bond, which had tumbled to 66 cents on the dollar in early September as debt concerns deepened, currently trades around the 80-cents mark, Tradeweb data showed.

That is well above the threshold of 70 cents, below which debt is considered distressed.

Investment and advisory firm Centerview Partners, founded in 2006, has recently been on a push to increase its sovereign advisory business and has been hiring widely over the past year to beef up its global operations both in Paris and New York.

The Maldives’ government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

By Mike Scarcella

(Reuters) – Google has asked a California federal judge to pause his sweeping court order requiring it to open up its app store Play to greater competition.

In a court filing on Friday night, Google said U.S. District Judge James Donato’s injunction order, which goes into effect on Nov. 1, would harm the company and introduce “serious safety, security, and privacy risks into the Android ecosystem.”

The tech giant, a unit of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), asked Donato to stay the order while it pursues an appeal.

The judge issued the injunction on Oct. 7 in a case brought by “Fortnite” maker Epic Games, which persuaded a federal jury last year that Google was illegally monopolizing how consumers download apps on Android devices and how they pay for in-app transactions.

The judge’s order said Google must allow users to download competing third-party Android app platforms or stores and can no longer prohibit the use of competing in-app payment methods. It also bars Google from making payments to device makers to preinstall its app store and from sharing revenue generated from the Play store with other app distributors.

If Donato denies Google’s bid to put the injunction on hold, the company can ask the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to do so while it appeals the jury’s underlying antitrust verdict.

Google filed its notice of appeal to the 9th Circuit on Thursday. The appeals court ultimately would be expected to weigh and rule on Google’s challenge to Donato’s order.

ROME (Reuters) – German trade union Verdi would oppose a cross-border merger for Commerzbank (ETR:CBKG) even if the bidder was not an Italian bank like UniCredit, an official said on Saturday.

Berlin was taken aback by UniCredit’s swoop to build a large stake in state-backed Commerzbank, a move the Italian bank says could lead to a merger.

Officials told Reuters on Friday that Germany is working to frustrate a possible takeover that could tie Berlin’s fortunes to those of heavily indebted Italy.

“(Our opposition) is not due to the fact that (the bidder) is an Italian bank. It could be French or Spanish,” Frederik Werning, a Verdi labour union official and a member of the Commerzbank Supervisory Board, said in a interview with Italian broadcaster La7.

“When a merger happens every time they say that nothing will change but one out of two times they don’t keep their promise and jobs would be lost both in Germany and in Italy”.

The merging banks would for at least two years be preoccupied with integration at a time when Germany needs to boost investment, Werning added.

“If the takeover happens, UniCredit and Commerzbank will have to take care of themselves for years and they will no longer be strong partners for their clients, neither in Italy nor in Germany,” he added.

At the heart of Germany’s concern is UniCredit’s 40 billion euros ($44 billion) holding of Italian government bonds. Commerzbank, which is smaller and financially weaker than UniCredit, also has billions of euros of Italian bonds.

($1 = 0.9143 euros)

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan’s China Airlines is not facing any political pressure on its decision about whether to buy Boeing (NYSE:BA) or Airbus aircraft for a refreshment of its long-haul fleet, the company’s chairman said on Saturday.

Taiwan’s largest carrier has been weighing Boeing’s 777X and the Airbus A350-1000 as replacements for its fleet of 10 Boeing 777-300ERs, mostly used on U.S. and some high-density regional routes, according to industry sources.

China Airlines Chairman Hsieh Shih-chien told reporters the company was still in the process of evaluating which aircraft to take and, asked if there was any political pressure on the decision, replied “no”.

“When it comes to buying aircraft, it is only China Airlines ourselves who makes the assessment. I want to clarify this,” Hsieh added.

Multibillion-dollar deals for new aircraft often have to take political as well as business considerations into account – especially in the case of Taiwan, given its international situation and pressure it faces to give in to China’s sovereignty claims, which are rejected by the democratically elected government in Taipei.

The United States is Taiwan’s most important international backer and arms supplier despite a lack of formal diplomatic ties, and China Airlines’ majority owner is the Taiwan government.

A senior industry source told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter, that on the China Airlines deal the timing was a complicating factor given November’s U.S. election.

In 2022, shortly after then-U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei – which set off Chinese war games – China Airlines announced a $4.6 billion order for Boeing’s 787 to replace its ageing fleet of Airbus A330s.

China Airlines already operates 15 of the smaller Airbus A350-900s, as well as nine of the freighter version of the 777.

Hsieh said the 787s would start arriving from next year, while a further 11 Airbus A321s, which are replacing its older Boeing 737-800s, would all come before 2026.

(Reuters) -More than a hundred Hilton hotel workers in Seattle have walked off the job calling for higher wages, fair staffing and workloads, and the reversal of COVID-19 era cuts, the Unite Here union said on Saturday.

“The weeklong strikes by 374 workers at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Seattle Airport and Hilton Seattle Airport & Conference Center will last until the early hours of Oct. 19,” the union said.

Hilton did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

A total of over 4,300 hotel workers are now on strike at Hilton, Hyatt, and Marriott hotels in Honolulu, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.

Around 2,000 workers walked off the job in September at Hilton’s largest hotel in the world, the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Honolulu.

Some 10,000 U.S. hotel workers began a multi-day strike in several cities during the Labor Day weekend after contract talks with Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt stalled.

Unite Here represents workers in hotels, casinos and airports across the United States and Canada.

MEXICO CITY/HOUSTON (Reuters) -Pemex’s Deer Park oil refinery near Houston will operate this weekend at a low level following a deadly chemical leak a couple days ago, Mexico’s national oil company said in a statement late on Friday.

The state-owned oil company said it is continuing to investigate the cause of Thursday’s hydrogen sulfide gas leak that killed two contract workers while injuring 35 others during work on a unit at the 312,500-barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery.

Work was underway on a sulfur recovery unit at the time, according to people familiar with the matter.

Pemex management has operated the facility for nearly three years.

The facility is a major motor fuels supplier to Mexico, where the ruling party has sought to reduce reliance on gasoline and diesel imports from non-Pemex refiners in a push to be more energy self-sufficient.

On Friday, Pemex’s CEO Victor Rodriguez said that thirteen workers remained hospitalized after being exposed to the leak, while Mexico’s energy minister said she expected the facility to be back to normal operations later on Friday.

But the company walked back that expectation with its latest statement.

“The refinery continues to operate in stable conditions at a low level, a level that will be kept in place during the weekend as long as it’s possible to have access to the areas to carry out the corresponding inspections,” the company said in its Friday night statement.

Rodriguez, who took over earlier this month, noted on Friday that three or four units had been shut at the refinery following the incident.

The U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), which investigates industrial accidents and makes recommendations to prevent future incidents, also has begun a probe of what it described as a “very serious incident.”

Deer Park for decades was operated by oil major Shell (LON:SHEL), but Pemex took full ownership of the refinery in early 2022, acquiring Shell’s 50% stake in what had been a long-standing joint venture.

In 2021, Shell disclosed that it sold its interest in Deer Park to Pemex for some $596 million.

Pemex’s domestic refineries have for years suffered a series of accidents, including explosions and fires, that have caused deaths in Mexico.

By Samuel Shen, Ankur Banerjee and Tom Westbrook

SHANGHAI/SINGAPORE (Reuters) – China’s highly anticipated announcement of financial stimulus plans on Saturday was big on intent but low on the measurable details that investors need to ratify their recent return to the world’s second-biggest stock market.

Saturday’s news conference by Finance Minister Lan Foan reiterated Beijing’s broad plans to revive the ailing economy, with promises made on significant increases to government debt and support for consumers and the property sector.

But for investors who were hoping to hear authorities spell out exactly how much the government will throw at the crisis, the briefing was disappointing.

“The strength of the announced fiscal stimulus plan is weaker than expected. There’s no timetable, no amount, no details of how the money will be spent,” said Huang Yan, investment manager at private fund company Shanghai QiuYang Capital Co in Shanghai.

Huang had hoped for more stimulus to boost consumption. Market analysts had been looking for a spending package between 2 trillion yuan to 10 trillion yuan ($283 billion to $1.4 trillion).

Reuters reported last month that China plans to issue special sovereign bonds worth about 2 trillion yuan this year as part of fresh fiscal stimulus. Bloomberg News reported China is considering the injection up to 1 trillion yuan of capital into its biggest state banks. Lan’s press conference did not give any specifics.

In the three weeks since the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) kicked off China’s most aggressive stimulus measures since the pandemic, the CSI300 Index has broken records for daily moves and is up 16% overall. Stocks have grown wobbly in recent sessions, though, as initial enthusiasm gave way to concerns about whether the policy support would be big enough to revive growth.

“If that’s what we have in terms of fiscal policies, the stock market bull run could run out of steam,” Huang said, referring to comments at Saturday’s press conference.

Heading into the briefing, some investors had braced for the finance minister to withhold actual spending details until China’s rubber-stamp parliament meets later this month.

Equally, investors also worried that mere interest rate cuts, which the PBOC has already announced, and a reluctance by the central government to spend will imperil the odds the world’s second-largest economy can hit its 5% growth target.

“Investors will need to be patient,” said HSBC’s chief Asia economist Fred Neumann, noting concrete numbers could come only by the end of this month when the standing committee of the National People’s Congress reviews and votes on specific proposals.

Jason Bedford, former China analyst at Bridgewater and UBS, pointed to Lan’s pledge to recapitalise big state banks as indicating authorities expect to see a revival in demand for credit.

“But the only way the economy needs more credit is if you create credit demand which can only be done if you provide fiscal (support).”

HOW MUCH?

Investors have good reason to be circumspect about how much Beijing will spend. The slump in consumer confidence and the property sector is a by-product of the years-long drive by the Communist Party leadership to reduce debt and root out corruption.

Yet, the hope that authorities are serious to fix those issues has driven foreign investors and domestic retail money into stocks. The PBOC’s 500-billion-yuan swap facility to channel more cash into the stock market has helped.

The Shanghai Composite index is up 12% since the measures were first announced on Sept. 24, but property and tourism stocks are still dragging in a sign of some doubts around the extent of state support.

Global commodity markets from iron ore to other industrial metals and oil have also been volatile on hopes stimulus will stoke its sluggish demand.

“Potentially some event money might be disappointed and remove some bets on the headline numbers not meeting high expectations but the more important capital flows might be encouraged by continuing efforts to stabilise the economy and keep growth at appropriate levels,” said Matthew Haupt, portfolio manager at Wilson Asset Management in Sydney.

According to LSEG Lipper data, overseas China funds received a net $13.91 billion since Sept. 24, pumping up inflows so far in 2024 to $54.34 billion. Much of that money has gone into exchange-traded funds (ETFs), while mutual funds are still reporting net outflows of $11.77 billion for the year.

Bedford is hopeful of a revival in retail interest sustaining the stock market rally.

“We have a perfect storm of four factors at play,” he said, citing pent-up household savings and a lack of attractive alternatives to the stock market, an alignment of corporate and shareholder interests driving up buybacks and dividends, and central bank programmes offering leverage to corporates and institutions to invest in the stock market.

“A sustained rally driven by the China household has the foundations for success … we are early in this process and the risk is the possibility of flawed execution or not communicating things well. The structural story remains compelling though.”

($1 = 7.0666 Chinese yuan renminbi)