Headlines

High-profile house builder Manor Park Homes is in receivership with debts of €170 million after the company’s directors told its bank that the business could not repay the money, the Irish Times reported. Businessman Joe Moran and his family own Manor Park, which made headlines eight years ago when it bought former taoiseach Charles Haughey’s estate in Kinsealy, Co Dublin, for €45 million.

Beleaguered Swedish carmaker Saab said on Thursday the administrator of its reorganisation plans to ask the court to halt the process, in a move that could force the company into bankruptcy, Agence France-Presse reported. Guy Lofalk, who has been appointed by the Vaenersborg district court in southwestern Sweden to oversee Saab's three-month restructuring process under bankruptcy protection, had informed the company he would ask that the process be terminated, Saab's Dutch owner Swedish Automobile (SWAN) said in a statement.

Two years after the Dubai debt crisis erupted, contributing to a wave of loan restructurings across the Gulf, those restructurings may be entering a more difficult phase as banks become reluctant to extend maturities further, the Kuwait Times reported. Government-related and private companies in the region have so far avoided defaults by agreeing with creditors to push out maturities-a process labelled "extend and pretend" by some cynical bankers. This method has helped banks avoid billions of dollars in writedowns and companies to avoid the shame of defaulting.

France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Frankfurt on Wednesday night for an emergency meeting with leading players in the eurozone crisis including German chancellor Angela Merkel, as Franco-German differences bedevilled attempts to agree a comprehensive package of measures, the Financial Times reported. The meeting broke up after two hours with neither the German or French leaders making any comment.

By now, it almost feels like a ritual: a strike and large demonstration disrupted by skirmishes and tear gas ahead of a parliamentary vote on new austerity measures that Greece needs to take to qualify for the next installment of aid the country needs to fend off default, the International Herald Tribune reported. But what was different on Wednesday, the first day of a two-day general strike before Parliament voted in the evening to approve new austerity measures, was the scale of the protest — tens of thousands of people — and the range of the demonstrators.

A double-notch downgrade to Spain’s credit ratings has piled more pressure on European leaders to make rapid progress on solving the region’s debt crisis or face unbearable borrowing costs, the Irish Times reported. The fresh blow from Moody’s Investors Service came just a day after the agency warned France its triple-A rating could be at risk and overshadowed a report that Germany and France were nearer a deal on leveraging the euro zone’s rescue fund.

The administrator of insolvent Austrian group A-TEC Industries has sold its ATB electrical drive division to China's Wolong group, he said in a statement on Wednesday, Reuters reported. A-TEC is being broken up and sold in parts after failing to complete a restructuring that aimed to pay off 47 percent of its debts to creditors. "A quick decision on a new owner for ATB -- in contrast to the two other divisions Mechanical Engineering and Minerals & Metals, whose liquidation is under way -- was of significant importance," administrator Matthias Schmidt said in a statement.

Europe’s grand plan to strengthen its banking system is set to fall well short of market expectations, identifying a capital shortfall of less than €100bn that must be made up over the next six to nine months, according to the latest official estimates, the Financial Times reported. The European Union’s estimate of the necessary recapitalisation effort compares with a recent Inernational Monetary Fund report that identified a €200bn hole in banks’ balance sheets stemming from sovereign debt writedowns.

Irish fashion retailer A|wear has been sold to a UK group called Hilco, which specialises in distressed restructurings, the Irish Times reported. No financial details were released yesterday although Hilco said it would provide A|wear with “extended working capital facilities to facilitate the business’s financial needs”. A|wear was sold by Brown Thomas in 2007 for a reported €70 million to a consortium comprising UK private equity group Alchemy Partners and management, who took a 20 per cent stake in the business. The deal was backed with debt provided by Ulster Bank.

Disagreement between France and Germany may prevent eurozone leaders from reaching a crucial deal on a second rescue package for Greece this weekend, a person familiar with the negotiations said Tuesday, The Washington Post reported on an Associated Press story. A common position of the two biggest eurozone economies is seen as a precondition for reaching agreement between all 17 countries in the currency union at a crisis summit on Sunday.