Barclays capital push

Barclays Plc, the UK's second-largest bank by assets, said it would raise the equivalent of £5.8billion ($9.8 billion) in a rights offering to bolster capital as it booked its biggest charge to date for customer compensation. It will also shrink assets by as much as £80 billion to £1.5trillion and sell about £2 billion of loss-absorbing securities to meet calls by the British regulator to reduce leverage. Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins is selling more shares than the £4 billion analysts had anticipated after the lender's capital shortfall swelled to £12.8 billion at the end of June under the stricter Basel III rules on bank capital.

Leighton casino coup

Construction giant Leighton has snared a $2.8billion contract to build a new luxury casino in Macau. Leighton's Asian division will build the 450,000 square metre resort and hotel after sealing a deal with Wynn Resorts, which owns casinos in Las Vegas and Macau. The resort will be built on the Cotai Strip in the international gambling destination. Leighton chief executive Hamish Tyrwhitt said the project was part of a broader plan to continue to expand the company's presence in Asia. Construction is due to be completed in early 2016.

Japan woes deepen

Japanese factories put in an unexpectedly weak performance in June while household spending also slipped, underscoring the challenge Tokyo faces in kick-starting the world's third-largest economy. Figures offer a mixed picture for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's bid to stoke the deflation-plagued economy, after he unleashed a growth-boosting program dubbed "Abenomics" involving massive government spending and central bank monetary easing. The key aim is to reverse years of falling prices, as the Bank of Japan (BoJ) aims to hit a 2 per cent inflation target in as many years, an ambitious timeline that some analysts have cast doubt on.