Stablecoin's plan to go public cancelled.

Stablecoin group Circle has ditched plans to go public in a $9bn deal through a blank cheque company chaired by former Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond, underlining how successive crises have hit the crypto sector. The tie-up, which was forged during the crypto bull market in July 2021 and expanded early this year, was seeking a valuation of $7.65bn to $9bn. The collapse of the Circle deal comes after the failure of digital asset exchange FTX, which knocked a crypto industry already under pressure from rising interest rates and a series of bankruptcies of big-name firms. Circle’s USD Coin is the second-largest stablecoin on the crypto market, with a valuation of around $43bn, according to data from Circle, falling from more than $55bn in June last year after investors pulled out of the crypto market.

Stablecoins play a key role in connecting traditional and crypto markets, with most tracking the value of a major currency such as the dollar. Crypto traders use them like cash between making bets. Many publicly listed crypto groups come been under pressure this year. Market tumult has hit other key players in the crypto industry, including broker Genesis, which halted withdrawals from its lending scheme last month, and lending platform BlockFi, which followed FTX into bankruptcy.

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Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

Transport department officials have begun work on «Project Silverlight» suggesting the highspeed rail scheme might face four additional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces further delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by ministers to rein in its ballooning costs. The extra delays to the country’s biggest infrastructure project would mean that it would not be completed until as late as 2045 — 12 years after originally planned. «This is a function of inflation; we are having to find huge savings because the cost of everything the department is already doing will have become so much more expensive by then,» said one government official. In October, the FT reported that the Treasury had asked HS2’s management team to identify potential cuts or «scope reductions» to the high-speed line. Transport department officials have subsequently begun work on Project Silverlight aimed at fi...

Small business will be excluded from fraud law.

Ministers are planning to exclude small businesses from anti-fraud legislation by narrowing the scope of a criminal offence targeting companies that fail to prevent economic crimes. MPs and anti-corruption campaigners had hoped the government would seek to amend the economic crime and corporate transparency bill to ensure the new offence covered all companies. The plans to limit the scope of the amendments will also disappoint those who had hoped the legislation would remove key hurdles to the prosecution of white-collar crime. A new «failure to prevent» offence for fraud would bring it in line with existing similar corporate offences for bribery and tax evasion. At present, prosecutors need only prove that organisations lacked «reasonable» or «adequate» controls to pursue the offence in bribery and tax evasion cases. «It would be much more sensible for the government to provide strong guidance for SMEs on what these proce...

Doubt on CS's collateral.

Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...

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