Pakistan’s largest commercial bank in the private sector, HBL, faces allegations of facilitating terror financing during the 2010-19 period, a charge that the bank said it is contesting “fully and vigorously” in a US court. Media reports suggested that some 370 individual complainants had demanded compensation from HBL. This subsequently triggered a big fall in the bank’s share price on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) on Thursday.

Pakistan’s two leading car assemblers, Toyota and Suzuki, plan partial plant shutdowns next month due to unavailability of raw material amid import restrictions and exchange rate volatility. The freefalling of rupee has had a cascading effect on industries that rely on imports to complete finished goods as the central bank delayed clearance of letters of credit with banks facing a shortage of dollars, affecting their ability to import materials.

Pakistan’s top performing startup, Airlift, announced on Tuesday that it had permanently shut operations in the country after day-to-day running finances dried up and an attempt to raise fresh funds failed last week. The grocery delivery startup had raised the largest financing of $85 million in the country’s history in the Series B funding round in August 2021.

Moody’s Investors Service – one of the world’s top three credit rating agencies – on Thursday downgraded Pakistan’s outlook from stable to negative. The decision to change the outlook to negative is driven by Pakistan’s heightened external vulnerability risk and uncertainty around the sovereign’s ability to secure additional external financing to meet its needs, the rating agency said in its report.