A major creditor of Proview Electronics, which is challenging Apple Inc.'s use of the iPad trademark, has moved to have the ailing computer monitor maker liquidated, reports said Monday, the Associated Press reported. Taiwan-based Fubon Insurance is seeking $8.68 million in debts and has filed an application to have Proview declared bankrupt, the reports by the Xinhua News Agency and other mainland media said.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda faces an increasingly uphill battle to push through a plan to double the nation's sales tax, struggling to win support from both opposition parties and his own government amid rising global scrutiny of Tokyo's deteriorating fiscal condition, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Noda needs to meet an end of March deadline, as stipulated by the tax law, to submit to parliament a bill that would raise the 5% consumption tax to 10% by 2015.

South Korea has begun collecting a levy on domestic banks and local branches of foreign banks it introduced in August, hoping to help the economy guard against shocks stemming from rapid capital flows in and out of the country, the Finance Ministry said Sunday. The Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. paid $759,000, making it the first foreign or domestic bank to pay what is called the "macroprudential stability levy" to the Bank of Korea.

Directors of some pension funds that invested money with AIJ Investment Advisors Co. say they were attracted by promises of high, or at least sustainable, returns on their investments through the global economic downturn, The Wall Street Journal reported. Now those funds may be facing losses, days after Japan's Financial Services Agency ordered AIJ to suspend its operations, saying the firm allegedly lost most of ¥183 billion ($2.27 billion) in funds it managed. Neither AIJ nor its broker, ITM Securities Co., has been accused of wrongdoing.

Elpida Memory filed for protection from creditors on Monday with $5.6 billion in debt, the biggest bankruptcy filing by a Japanese manufacturer, after potential partners failed to come through to rescue the cash-strapped chipmaker, Reuters reported. Japan, which had lent or invested 40 billion yen ($500 million) with the country's last maker of PC memory chips to help it through the post-Lehman Brothers crisis, appeared to throw in the towel this time as it confronts slumping prices and relentless competition from well-funded Korean rivals.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick said that China's economic growth model is "unsustainable" and urged deep reforms to avoid a sharp downturn on growth over the coming two decades, The Wall Street Journal reported. There are "stress points [in the economy] that will expand over time rather than [turn into] a crisis," he said at a conference in Beijing where the World Bank and the Development Research Center, an influential government think tank, jointly introduced a report, "China 2030," that recommended sharp reforms in China's economy.

Japan's financial regulator said Friday it has halted operations of a little-known Tokyo money-management company after the firm allegedly lost billions of dollars in client money, The Wall Street Journal reported. In one of the biggest cases of its kind in Japan, with Tokyo's reputation as a financial center still bruised by the billion-dollar Olympus Corp. accounting scandal, the regulator said investigators found that AIJ Investment Advisors Co. can't account for "most of" the 183 billion yen, or about $2.3 billion, in pension-fund assets under management.

China's two-year push to drive down property prices has punished many of the nation's once highflying property developers and stymied a number of upscale projects, The Wall Street Journal reported. Real estate was once one of the nation's most successful industries. Some stocks of mainland property developers in Hong Kong more than doubled in 2009, faster than the Hang Seng Index's 50% gain that year. As a result, developers plowed billions of dollars into huge developments—with apartments, commercial space, pools and golf courses—outside top-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Chinese banks are wrestling with rising funding costs both inside and outside China's borders, at a time when these banks are expected to lend more to bolster China when its trade and real-estate sectors are sagging, The Wall Street Journal reported. In China's interbank market, state-owned banks have seen a jump in the interest rates charged amongst themselves in recent days, leading the country's central bank to cut its bank-reserve requirements on Saturday, its second such move in four months. The reduction in reserve-requirement ratio, effective Feb.

The head of AerCap Holdings NV said Wednesday that it repossessed two planes from India's Kingfisher Airlines Ltd., underscoring the challenges facing aircraft leasing companies after the collapse of as many as a dozen carriers so far this year, Dow Jones DBR Small Cap reported. Kingfisher has grounded planes and is seen by analysts as the next potential casualty of the tough industry environment that has already claimed large carriers such as Hungary's Malev and Spanair in Spain.