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.

Larry Yung quit as chairman of Citic Pacific Ltd. after the biggest currency loss reported by a Chinese company triggered a police investigation, Bloomberg reported. Yung, the son of a former Chinese vice president, will be replaced by Chang Zhenming, 52, the vice chairman of parent Citic Group, Citic Pacific said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange today. The 67-year-old executive, ranked the nation’s richest man in 2005, is leaving after currency losses of HK$14.6 billion ($1.9 billion) forced him to seek help from Beijing.

The Russian factory known as Avtovaz is one of the least efficient automobile factories anywhere in the world--each worker produces, on average, eight cars a year, compared with 36 cars a year at General Motors’ assembly line in Bowling Green, Ky., for example. Yet the government is giving Avtovaz billions of dollars in aid, no strings attached, The New York Times reported. “The key issue is too much government protection,” Yegor T. Gaidar, a former prime minister, said.