Asia Pacific

Russia's AvtoVAZ could face bankruptcy if it is unable to reach a debt restructuring deal with its banks, despite support from its 25 percent stakeholder Renault, Reuters reported. Speaking during a presentation at AvtoVAZ headquarters in Togliatti, a company official said the future of the Lada-maker remained on the line and said the company has 22,000 extra staff on its payroll that are not anticipated to have any work before 2012.

Canadian provinces, seeking more than C$80 billion ($76 billion) from tobacco companies for treatment of smoking-related illnesses, are attempting to improperly use the bankruptcy process to force Japan Tobacco Inc.’s JTI-MacDonald unit to settle, a company lawyer said. JTI-MacDonald, the maker of Export A cigarettes in Canada, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2004, after a Quebec judge ordered the company to pay C$1.4 billion that the province claims it lost in taxes when tobacco companies exported cigarettes to the U.S.

Shares in Japan Airlines rallied sharply on Monday after it emerged that the government would push for quick adoption of a recovery plan for the ailing carrier, the Financial Times reported. JAL’s shares jumped 12 per cent on the Tokyo Stock Exchange to close at Y113. That was still less than half the price they fetched a year ago, however, and significantly below their value at the start of last week, before a flurry of selling drove them to historic lows.

Japan's top financial-services regulator is preparing to further shake up banking standards, continuing efforts that already have roiled markets and put big business on tenterhooks only a month into his new job, The Wall Street Journal reported. Shizuka Kamei, Japan's Financial Services Minister, vowed in an interview on Monday to ease capital rules for lenders to small businesses and to put pressure on big companies that set tough terms with smaller suppliers.

Shares of struggling carrier Japan Airlines Corp. slid to a new all-time low Friday as investors spooked by the state of its balance sheet shrugged aside assurances from Japan's transport minister that a long-awaited, multi-billion dollar restructuring plan backed by the government is coming together smoothly, Dow Jones reported. JAL's plight comes after the company slumped to its largest-ever quarterly net loss of Y99 billion in the April-June quarter, from a Y3.41 billion net loss in the same period a year earlier.

Bankruptcy petitions in Hong Kong continued to surge in September, rising 31 percent from a year earlier, despite an improving economic environment, government data showed on Friday. Bankruptcy petitions totalled 1,142 in September, up from 873 a year earlier, and increased from August, when 1,099 petitions were filed, although monthly figures are not seasonally adjusted.

China would risk instability by letting the yuan appreciate excessively, the Asian Development Bank cautioned after the U.S. Treasury Department criticized the currency’s lack of flexibility. “We should not push hard for China to appreciate the currency too fast,” said Yolanda Fernandez Lommen, chief China economist for the ADB. “We don’t want to see China, the third largest economy in the world, unstable.

GM Daewoo, which accounts for about a quarter of GM's global auto production, also represents one of the few remaining areas needing restructuring after the U.S. automaker exited bankruptcy in July with $50 billion in U.S. government funding. GM Chief Executive Fritz Henderson is in Seoul this week to discuss options for restructuring GM Daewoo with the South Korean government -- an increasingly important asset for the automaker.

General Motors could finalize the sale of its German auto unit Opel as early as this week, the U.S. automaker's CEO said Tuesday. Fritz Henderson, visiting China for the first time since GM was restructured last summer, was also upbeat about the prospects for the sale of the company's Hummer unit to Chinese buyer Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Corp., which is still awaiting Chinese government approval, The Associated Press reported.

Asia's richest individuals lost 35% of their wealth amid the financial turmoil of 2008, compared with a 24% decline for that group world-wide, according to a joint study by Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and consulting firm Capgemini. Regionwide, Hong Kong's elite got hurt the worst. Most of the city's wealthy -- 61.3% -- were kicked out of the elite category, which means their net worth slipped below the US$1 million threshold, the study says. The size of that market now stands at around 37,000 individuals in Hong Kong, a regional financial hub of seven million people.