Headlines

Irish clothing retail chain A-Wear has fallen into receivership, with some of its stores set to close, Just Style reported. Ken Fennell of Kavanagh Fennell has been appointed receiver to the business, less than two months after Latzur Ltd, which trades as A-Wear, entered examinership. Fennell said the initial examinership process was aimed at putting the business on "a sustainable footing", and protecting "as many jobs as possible". Sales projections for the business in the intervening weeks, however, did not materialise, Fennell said, with "no viable investment proposal forthcoming".

Iceland's government unveiled a 150 billion Icelandic kronur ($1.25 billion) household-debt relief program Saturday, with the plan calling for increased taxes on the financial-services industry to help fund mortgage write-downs for Icelanders equivalent to several thousand dollars per mortgage holder, The Wall Street Journal reported. The program, unveiled by Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson about six months after taking office, comes after a 2013 election where promises to address high levels of household debt in the small island nation was a central issue.

The threat of emergency intervention by the Bank of England into the Co-operative Bank receded on Friday night after thousands of retail investors gave their backing to a £1.5bn lifeline for the troubled high street bank, The Guardian reported. The support of the bondholders is a major step towards avoiding Threadneedle Street having to step in to wind up the bank but is part of a process that will force the Co-op Group – which owns supermarkets, funeral homes and pharmacies – to cede control of its banking business to bondholders, who have been led by aggressive US hedge funds.

The new owners of Swedish car maker Saab, National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB, will restart production of the 9-3 sedan on Monday at the Trollhattan factory in Sweden, a NEVS spokesman said on Friday, Reuters reported. The 9-3 sedan will be powered by a turbocharged gasoline engine and built in "small and humble numbers" for China and Sweden, NEVS spokesman Mikael Ostlund said. The move comes almost two years after Saab, which had made cars since 1947, filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2011.

Kookmin Bank, South Korea’s largest lender by assets, said it will close 55 branches in January as the country’s lenders struggle with the lowest lending margins in four years, Bloomberg reported. The closures will cut costs and help the Seoul-based bank, a unit of KB Financial Group Inc., better serve Korean customers who are using Internet banking more frequently, Kookmin Bank said in an e-mailed statement today. The lender has 1,205 branches across South Korea, company data show. Kookmin Bank is joining Standard Chartered Plc and Citigroup Inc.

Austria will not let nationalised lender Hypo Alpe Adria go bust, Austrian National Bank Governor Ewald Nowotny said on Friday after a newspaper reported that a top government adviser favoured the idea, Reuters reported. "Austria reached a clear agreement with the European Commission this summer on restructuring Hypo Alpe Adria. We are now proceeding according to this concept. A Hypo bankruptcy is out of the question," Nowotny told the Austria Press Agency.

NZAX-listed tourism marketing company Jasons Travel Media has suspended trading after being placed in receivership and breaching stock exchange listing rules, The Dominion Post reported. The company, which distributes travel information in print and online, said that given the company's rapidly deteriorating financial position, the unlikely prospects of a recovery in the short term, and the consequential need to protect creditors and preserve the assets of the company, the board had asked ANZ to appoint a receiver.

Loss-making Alitalia has yet to raise all of the 300 million euros ($407 million) it was seeking in an emergency cash call, piling more pressure on the Italian airline and find a strategic investor to keep it flying, Reuters reported. Alitalia said on Thursday it had received 173 million euros by a deadline for existing shareholders to subscribe to its cash call via pledges and bank guarantees and expected to raise the rest from the state-owned postal service and other investors.

Bruised by the traumatic experience of Greece’s two bailouts, staff of the International Monetary Fund floated a proposal in April that would insist that distressed countries’ excessive debts be restructured before a bailout is granted. In a riposte published this week, a group of leading authorities on sovereign debt claims the idea goes too far, The Wall Street Journal reported. Instead, the experts—including lawyer Lee Buchheit, academic Mitu Gulati and former IMF deputy managing director Anne Krueger– advocate gentler treatment of private-sector creditors.

The prevalence of so-called "wilful" defaults is symptomatic of what critics say is a loose credit culture that plagues Asia's third-biggest economy, keeping underperforming companies in business, crowding out other borrowers and leaving taxpayers on the hook to recapitalise state banks, The Economic Times reported. The Reserve Bank of India defines a wilful defaulter as a borrower that is able but unwilling to pay, has diverted loan proceeds for other than their initially stated use, or has overstated profits in order to obtain a loan.