The window has reopened for Canberra to acquire the water rights to the nation's biggest irrigator, southwest Queensland's Cubbie cotton station, if voluntary administrators fail to sell the struggling operation. As floodwaters poured into massive dams that can hold enough water to fill Sydney Harbour, promising two full crops of cotton worth up to $280 million, sources told The Australian the administrators were negotiating with the federal government.

Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank president, is returning early from a conference in Australia to take part in a summit meeting of European leaders this week, amid speculation over possible action to ease the debt crisis several countries are facing, The New York Times reported. Mr. Trichet will attend the meeting Thursday of the European Council called by Herman Van Rompuy, the bloc’s first full-time president, an E.C.B. spokesman said Tuesday. He said Mr. Trichet was only invited to the meeting on Monday. The E.C.B.

Australian firms will find it easier to sell bonds in the U.S. after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s government said it would reverse a court decision that ranked shareholders equally with creditors, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said, BusinessWeek reported. Some U.S. private placement investors had put Australian bonds into the “too-hard basket” on concerns that the Sons of Gwalia ruling would lower their ranking in the event of a default, ANZ head of debt capital markets Brad Scott said in a Feb. 5 briefing to investors.

About 500 students from a Perth English language school that closed on Friday will be offered positions in other similar schools across the city, ABC Perth reported. Eight schools in Australia run by the GEOS Group of companies went into voluntary administration after failing to repay millions of dollars debt. At a meeting this afternoon students of St Mark's college in the Perth suburb of Highgate were told they would not have to pay if they needed to extend their student visas as a result of the school closure.

Eight English language schools operated in Australia by the GEOS group have gone into voluntary administration, leaving about 2300 foreign students unsure of their future, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on an Australian Associated Press story. Justin Walsh and Adam Nikitins of Ernst & Young have been appointed administrators to nine companies operating the schools in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Gold Coast and Cairns. They have about 390 employees and international students from a number of different countries.

The owner and operator of Sydney's Lane Cove Tunnel and the Military Road E-Ramp, Connector Motorways Pty Ltd, has been placed in receivership, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on an Australian Associated Press story. Martin Madden and David Merryweather of corporate recovery services provider KordaMentha said they had been appointed receivers and managers to Connector on Wednesday by the security trustee, BTA Institutional Services Australia Ltd. "The objective of the receivers is to put the tunnel assets on a firm financial footing," Mr Madden said.

Proposed changes to insolvency laws will put Australia on equal footing with other countries in restructuring ailing companies, prevent higher funding costs and provide greater certainty in liquidations, according to experts, The Australian reported. Company directors will be the big winners from the proposed new laws, announced by Corporate Law Minister Chris Bowen yesterday, by protecting them from legal claims while trying to restructure a financially troubled company.

Foreign investors were a major force in New York’s real estate boom of the last decade, with families and companies from Dubai to Australia swallowing weekend apartments and Midtown office towers. In 2007, the roster of international investors came to include a British firm, Dawnay Day, whose executives had a splashy reputation for spending millions on fine art and yachts, The New York Times reported. The efforts [to regentrify East Harlem neighborhoods], though, didn’t get far before the recession spread across the globe and Dawnay Day went bust.

The Rudd government will provide $15 million in taxpayer funds for a loan to help fund a charitable takeover of the nation's biggest childcare chain, the collapsed ABC Learning group, The Australian reported. A dozen philanthropists -- including Robin Crawford, a founding director of Macquarie Bank, Seek founder and BRW Young Rich-lister Matthew Rockman, and former Microsoft boss Daniel Petre -- also lent cash to the GoodStart consortium.

A second wave of corporate collapses is still causing headaches for Australia’s banks even after many declared the worst was behind them on the bad-debt front, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. Cubbie Station, a giant cotton farm in Queensland's south-west, went into voluntary administration last month owing an estimated $320 million, including $227 million to National Australia Bank. Suncorp is believed to also have a significant exposure.