Investors in collapsed Australian derivatives trader Halifax are set to have a long wait to get their money back after the administrator found "accounting irregularities" and said they will have to go to court to get a direction on how to disperse the money, The New Zealand Herald reported. Voluntary administrators Ferrier Hodgson, who were appointed in November, released an update on Halifax yesterday and said they had now undertaken a wide-scale investigation of Halifax's financial position.

Beleaguered rich-lister Eric Watson will likely remain embroiled in courts for years — and faces the possibility of a tax bill of $200m when penalties are added — after a landmark court decision yesterday saw his businesses ruled to have engaged in $51.5m in tax avoidance, The New Zealand Herald reported. Justice Matthew Palmer said a complex 2002 transaction — involving Cayman Island companies while Watson himself was relocating from New Zealand to the UK for tax purposes — was an avoidance arrangement. The case is one of the largest tax judgments in New Zealand history.

India’s debt-laden Jet Airways Ltd denied a media report on Monday that it had secured a 20.50 billion rupee ($293 million) loan from state-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB) to help pay overdue plane leasing fees and salaries, Reuters reported. The airline, which has had to ground planes after failing to make payments to leasing companies and is behind on paying pilots’ wages, said in a statement to the stock exchange that it has an existing credit facility of $300 million from PNB and that the bank has not provided any fresh credit.

Investors are at it again, sorting through the heap of China’s credit data. Last month’s aggregate social-financing numbers, released Sunday, show the flow of new credit in (and around) the financial system fell 41 percent in February from a year earlier, a Bloomberg View reported. Retail loans posted their largest monthly drop on record. Companies continued to struggle with working-capital financing; bonds were the main channel of funding. Looking for signals of economic recovery in such noisy data is a fool’s errand. Just a month earlier, the same figure surged 51 percent.

It’s payback time for Turkey’s economy after a decade of living beyond its means, and the reckoning couldn’t come at a worse time for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the country heads toward bellwether municipal elections. An era of record monetary stimulus around the world supercharged Turkish companies as capital came pouring in, more than doubling corporate credit in the past 10 years, Bloomberg News reported. Driven by Erdogan’s push for growth at all costs, the momentum rarely stalled as the Middle East’s biggest economy repeatedly boomed back to life after downturns.

India’s bankruptcy court on Friday approved global steel giant ArcelorMittal SA’s bid for debt-ridden Essar Steel, potentially ending months of court battles and opening the country’s steel industry to outsiders, Reuters reported. ArcelorMittal confirmed the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) had approved the takeover of the 10 million tonne steel plant of Essar Steel by itself and Japan’s Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp, paving the way for the first major foreign participation in India’s steel sector.

Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan Motor chairman facing charges of financial wrongdoing in Japan, was released on bail on Wednesday after being held in a Tokyo jail since late November, the International New York Times reported. A judge approved Mr. Ghosn’s release on bail of 1 billion yen, or almost $9 million, on Tuesday, and rejected an appeal by prosecutors to keep him detained until trial. Mr. Ghosn paid in cash on Wednesday and walked out surrounded by police guards in the late afternoon. Mr.

Turkey’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate on hold on Wednesday, sticking to a promise to stand firm on inflation even as the economy suffers a sharp slowdown in growth, the Financial Times reported. In its final meeting before critical local elections at the end of March, the bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) said that its one-week rate repo rate would remain at 24 per cent. Turkey has struggled with sky-high inflation following a meltdown in the lira, which wiped almost 30 per cent off the currency versus the dollar last year.

Moana Park Winery has gone into voluntary administration, The New Zealand Herald reported. The Puketapu-based, multi-award winning winery, which is officially registered as World's Best Little Wine Company Ltd, chose to take that step itself on Tuesday. Owned by Daniel and Kaylea Barker, the family business, has made a name for itself with a focus on producing natural, low allergen wines. It's also considered one of the stars of the Hawke's Bay events scene, and hosts the annual Another Day in Taradise.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. has been on an expansion kick in the debt market. But its first attempt as a sole underwriter on a dollar high-yield bond sale didn’t go so well. The bank’s securities unit bought $500 million of bonds directly from oil and gas exploration firm CNX Resources Corp., with plans to parcel them off to investors later. Its decision to essentially guarantee the deal’s price allowed it to beat out Credit Suisse Group AG, which had already started gauging investor interest in the company, people familiar with the matter said.