Headlines

A Hull-based legal firm has been wound up by the High Court in Manchester for abusing the UK insolvency regime, Insolvency News reported. An investigation by The Insolvency Service found Lovell Hill & Co LLP (LCH) had been offering bankruptcy relocation services to Germans seeking to take advantage of the shorter bankruptcy discharge periods in the UK; an act known as bankruptcy tourism. Acting as bankruptcy relocation advisers, LHC assisted German nationals who wished to wrongly claim their Centre of Main Interest (COMI) was in England and Wales for bankruptcy purposes.

The central banks of Austria and Hungary should seek a “workable and fair” solution to the problems Austrian banks are facing with Hungary, and shouldn’t become each others’ enemies, Austrian central bank Governor Ewald Nowotny said Friday, The Wall Street Journal Emerging Europe blog reported. “Close relationships are not necessarily always easy relationships. Our two central banks recently faced some difficult issues revolving around some foreign-owned banks,” Mr.

Mayo-based Elverys Sports is set to be placed into receivership before being acquired by the company’s management team with the backing of investors brought to the deal by Dublin-based corporate finance house Capnua. This will secure the 650 jobs at the 55 Elverys outlets across the country but will result in the current owners, Mayo brothers John and James Staunton, no longer being involved in the business, the Irish Times reported.

Global rating agencies – often among the more sanguine voices on China – have warned that this week’s bailout of a soured $500m trust loan was a wasted chance to address rising moral hazard in the country’s shadow banking sector, the Financial Times reported. The words of caution follow a last-minute deal to avert the default of a Rmb3bn trust product backed by loans to a now-defunct coal mining company. The product’s issuer, China Credit Trust, on Monday said it had raised the cash needed to pay back investors from three unnamed backers.

Germany needs to improve regulation and supervision of financial markets in order to protect investors, including those who have been affected by this month's insolvency of the wind park group Prokon, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has said. "It remains the goal of the German government to better regulate and supervise the grey zones of the financial market," Schaeuble was quoted as saying in an advance release from an interview being published in Friday's Handelsblatt newspaper.

MEPs on Tuesday (4 February) are expected to back new rules that would make it easier to liquidate or restructure European companies that fall on hard times, European Voice reported. Yet there is concern that MEPs will remove a key innovation from the European Commission's proposal that would allow certain bankruptcies to be dealt with outside the courts.

Strauss Innovation, a German chain of small department stores, said on Thursday it was seeking protection from creditors to try and rescue its business which has 96 shops across the country, Reuters reported. Strauss, owned by U.S. private equity firm Sun Capital Partners, has suffered from a mild winter hurting sales of cold weather clothing, industry sources said. Earlier this week, German department store Karstadt said its sales fell 3 percent in the key Christmas period, while rival Kaufhof said the mild winter weather had dampened sales of clothes.

Members of a European Parliament committee investigating the role of the troika and the impact of its policies in Greece on Thursday heralded the end of an “interim” institution, to be replaced by a “more democratically accountable and transparent” inspection process, and underlined the need for debt relief if Greece is to emerge from a spiral of austerity, ekathimerini.com reported.

Unions at France's second-biggest courier business have agreed a deal that saves 2,150 jobs but offers little solace to French President Francois Hollande's efforts to reduce unemployment, Reuters reported. Workers at Mory-Ducros had been locked in dispute with majority shareholder Arcole Industries for weeks, occupying several company sites after the courier business filed for bankruptcy in November and launched a restructuring programme that put 5,200 jobs in jeopardy.

China Credit Trust Co. started repaying investors in a high-yield product whose threatened failure spurred concern of further defaults and contributed to a sell-off in emerging-market stocks and currencies. Most clients in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Beijing signed an agreement on Jan. 28 to transfer their rights in the 3-billion-yuan ($496 million) trust to unidentified buyers in exchange for an amount equal to the product’s face value, Chang Feng, a spokesman for an investor group, and Du Ronghai, another investor, told Bloomberg by phone. Investors were given until 5 p.m.