Asia Pacific

The Reserve Bank of Australia said the nation has joined its global peers in recession, but the long-term prospects for growth remain sound, Dow Jones Newswires reported. The statement by RBA Governor Glenn Stevens that Australia's economy is shrinking matches a similar message from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan, both of whom this week signaled Australia is headed for its first recession since the early 1990s.

The savings of about 5000 customers of New Zealand hamper company Mrs Christmas are in limbo after the business went into liquidation this morning, The National Business Review reported. In a shock move, Mrs Christmas withdrew its opposition to an application for liquidation filed by courier company Post Haste. This cleared the way for Associate Judge David Robinson to place the company in the hands of liquidators Damien Grant and Steven Khov of Waterstone Insolvency. “The evidence establishes that the defendant is indeed insolvent,” he said this morning.

A Tel Aviv court has appointed a receiver for the Israeli rough diamond trader Stelman, the Israel Diamond Exchange reported. Stelman’s bank debts are reportedly over $20 million. Stelman is a family-owned company with headquarters in Antwerp. According to reports, it is currently striving to reach debt settlements. Stelman was a major Diamond Trading Company (DTC) sightholder and a leading rough diamond trader. According to reports, aside from a debt of $5 million to Erez Daliyot, no Israeli diamond companies are owed money by Stelman.

Bankruptcy petitions in Hong Kong rose to a more than five-year high in March as the recession in the city deepened, government data showed Friday. The government said individuals and non-limited companies filed 1,872 bankruptcy petitions during the month, up from 1,500 in February, Dow Jones Newswires reported. March's figure was the highest since July 2003, when 1,899 bankruptcy petitions were filed as Hong Kong was recovering from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome crisis. The data come amid signs of a further deterioration in local economic conditions.

All around Asia, leveraged finance professionals are reinventing themselves as restructuring specialists, a survival strategy amid layoffs and a slowed pipeline of splashy public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, The Wall Street Journal reported. Investment banks and law firms here also are rushing to put together teams for dealing with what bankers are predicting will be a wave of business in the region in the second half of this year. In the U.S. and Europe, bankruptcy and restructuring specialists tend to focus on those situations for entire careers.

China’s government is considering additional stimulus measures to boost consumption and bolster growth just as the nation shows more signs of recovering, Bloomberg reported. The government will issue some “guideline” policies and continue to use fiscal and taxation measures to spur an expansion, the official China Securities Journal reported today, citing Gao Huiqing, a researcher at the State Information Center as saying on April 11.

Kleenmaid’s 150 staff will lose their jobs after the Queensland-based upmarket kitchen and laundry appliance seller was put into voluntary administration, the Australian Associated Press reported. However, 25 employees will be asked to help with the administration process involving the company which had 20 outlets in NSW, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia and a $90 million turnover last year. A total of $27 million in customer deposits has also been lost, the administrator says.

Islamic finance is slowing as the global financial crisis hits its hubs in Malaysia and the Gulf, but the sector now has a chance to move on to Western economies seeking to boost their financial centers. Regulatory differences still plague efforts to build cross-border Islamic banking, and harmonization among different schools of thought is one of the nascent industry's main obstacles as it looks to grow in European countries with large Muslim communities.

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, one of Japan’s three so-called “megabanks,” on Thursday reported a full-year loss of nearly $4 billion and said it planned to raise $8 billion via a new share offer, The New York Times reported. The news raised fresh concerns about the health of the country’s other banks as Japan’s recession deepens. SMFG said it had accrued a net loss of ¥390 billion, or about $3.9 billion, during the fiscal year that ended March 31--far off the ¥180 billion profit it had projected and the ¥462 billion profit it made the previous year.

Japan’s ruling party unveiled the country’s biggest-ever economic stimulus plan Thursday, a ¥15.4 trillion, or $154.4 billion, package of subsidies and tax breaks that aims to stem a deepening recession in the world’s second-biggest economy, the New York Times reported. The Liberal Democratic Party released details of the draft stimulus, worth about 3 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product, ahead of a formal announcement Friday. The plan would bring Japan’s total stimulus spending to ¥27 trillion since Prime Minister Taro Aso took office in September.