Asia Pacific

The man behind what is thought to be New Zealand's largest Ponzi scheme has been sentenced to 10 years and 10 months in prison, The New Zealand Herald reported. Wellington financier and former head of the Ross Asset Management group, David Ross, was sentenced in the Wellington District Court by Judge Denys Barry today. Ross had pleaded guilty to five charges brought against him by the Serious Fraud Office, including four for false accounting and one for theft by person in a special relationship.

South Korea’s three biggest shipping companies face a cash crunch as 3 trillion won ($2.8 billion) of bonds are due for repayment in the next two years amid mounting losses from a global slump in rates to carry cargo, Bloomberg reported. Hanjin Shipping Co., Hyundai Merchant Marine Co. and STX Pan Ocean Co. are all forecast to post losses in 2013 for a third consecutive year, further denting the combined 1.5 trillion won of cash and near cash items they had as of the end of June. The companies need to repay 1.4 trillion won of bonds next year and 1.6 trillion won the year after.

Creditors of the main unit of Chinese solar panel maker Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd on Tuesday approved a plan to restructure its $1.75 billion debts with proceeds from acquirer Hong Kong-listed Shunfeng Photovoltaic International Ltd., Reuters reported. Shunfeng announced this month it had agreed to take over indebted Wuxi Suntech Power Co Ltd for 3 billion yuan ($493 million), pending approvals from various parties including its own shareholders and Wuxi Suntech's creditors on the debt restructuring. Shunfeng has said it would use the proceeds to pay down Wuxi Suntech's debts.

The president of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., one of Japan's biggest financial institutions, said his company has extended an unspecified number of "suspicious loans" to people with ties to organized crime, the latest in a series of firms to make such an admission since a scandal in September over a similar disclosure by a rival, Mizuho Bank Ltd., The Wall Street Journal reported.

New Zealand's dairy sector is still highly indebted and vulnerable to a fall in record high commodity prices and rising interest rates, according to the Reserve Bank, The New Zealand Herald reported. High levels of agricultural debt, which is heavily concentrated in the dairy sector, poses a risk to the stability of the financial system, deputy governor Grant Spencer said at today's release of the central bank's six-monthly financial stability report.

Former Labor leaders Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have landed the party in dangerous new financial territory, with individual members warned ahead of this year's election that they would be held personally responsible if the party traded while insolvent, Business Spectator reported on an Australian Financial Review story. The newspaper said the warning was handed down in June by the party’s long-time legal advisor, Tony Lang, after Mr Rudd’s no-holes-barred 2007 campaign saw the party sell most of its assets.

Cyprus's economy will shrink by 7.7% this year, less than the 8.7% originally forecast, experts from the country's international creditors said in a statement Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Officials from Cyprus's so-called troika of lenders—the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank—who have just completed a fact-finding mission in Nicosia, said the economic situation remains difficult.

The share of Japanese households with no financial assets rose to a record as falling incomes forced people to dig into their savings, highlighting the potential for widening disparities under Abenomics, Bloomberg reported. The proportion reached 31 percent, according to a Bank of Japan survey released in Tokyo yesterday, up from 26 percent a year earlier and the highest since the poll began in 1963. The BOJ surveyed 8,000 households of two or more people aged 20 years or older from June 14 though July 23.

Suntech Power Holdings Co., the Chinese maker of solar panels whose main unit is reorganizing in the Cayman Islands, told a Manhattan court that an involuntary bankruptcy petition against it in the U.S. could derail restructuring efforts, Bloomberg reported. The creditors seeking the U.S. bankruptcy are a “tiny minority,” holding only 0.27 percent of the company’s outstanding debt, Suntech said in papers filed yesterday seeking to have the case dismissed.

China's Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd , once the world's largest maker of solar panels, filed for provisional liquidation, signaling that it may go out of business after years of steep declines in panel prices. Suntech's shares fell as much as 23 percent to $1.15 on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. "We do think this is the end for Suntech," Raymond James analyst Ryan Berney told Reuters. Suntech filed for provisional liquidation in the Cayman Islands, where it is incorporated.