Headlines

One of Northern Ireland’s leading family-owned development and building companies has revealed it has been forced to enter into talks with its creditors because of “economic pressures”, the Irish Times reported. The Belfast-based Carvill Group, which has been in business for more than 60 years, has contacted creditors to discuss an insolvency procedure that involves a legally binding agreement between a company and its creditors.

European leaders could announce broad outlines of a new deal to boost the euro zone's bailout funds at a summit on Friday, paving the way for a final agreement when they next meet in March, European officials say, The Wall Street Journal reported. It isn't yet clear whether enough agreement will emerge at the meeting to make an announcement about the rescue funds, but European officials said they expected discussions over the issue Friday as part of a two-step process that will be concluded in late March.

Royal Media Services chairman SK Macharia has moved to forestall a looming bankruptcy by filing an application seeking to set aside a court ruling that ordered his vast estate be placed under receivership, Business Daily Africa reported. Through his lawyers Dr Gibson Kamau Kuria and Mr Paul Muite, Mr Macharia on Monday appeared before Mr Justice Muga Apondi and pleaded to be allowed to deposit Sh35 million as security pending the filing of an intended appeal.

The Afghan Central Bank on Monday sharply disputed accounts by The New York Times and several other publications that Afghanistan’s largest bank had hundreds of millions of dollars more in losses than previously publicized. In a statement and a news conference it said that Kabul Bank, the country’s largest, “had a bright future.” Kabul Bank, the country’s most politically connected as well as the largest, was crippled last fall when it became known that it had hundreds of millions of dollars in nonperforming loans.

Argentina's largest electricity provider, Pampa Energia SA, said Monday it will pay $29 million to acquire Enron Pipeline Company Argentina SA, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. "The purchase is part of Pampa's broader plan to become an important player in Argentina's natural gas industry," a person familiar with the company's plans said. The pipeline company owns 10% of Compania de Inversiones de Energia SA, or Ciesa, which controls 55.3% of the gas distributor Transportadora de Gas del Sur SA, or TGS.

Royal Media Services chairman SK Macharia risks being declared bankrupt for failure to pay a transporter Sh35 million, Business Daily Africa reported. Lady Justice Martha Koome on Friday issued orders that the businessman’s vast estate be placed under receivership and appointed a government official as the trustee of his assets and liabilities. The orders followed a successful bankruptcy petition filed by Livingstone Waithaka, the managing director of Ocean Freight Transporters Company Limited.

A second group of Spanish savings banks says it has begun work to merge operations and establish a new bank following pressure from the government for the troubled sector to raise more capital and reveal its exposure to bad debt with greater transparency, Bloomberg reported on an Associated Press story. Unnim, a Catalan-based group formed by Caixa Manlleu, Caixa Sabadell and Caixa Terrassa — all savings banks or "cajas" — said in a statement late Friday its board has agreed to begin the process of creating a listed bank.

SAirGroup (formerly Swissair) was responsible for the bankruptcy of Sabena in November 2001, a Belgian court ruled, although it ordered a much lower payment than the claimants had sought, ATWOnline reported. It said the Swiss group, which held a 49.5% stake in the Belgian flag carrier, did not respect an August 2001 agreement to provide 60% of a €430 million ($589.4 million) cash injection needed to keep Sabena in business. The court ordered SAirGroup to pay Sabena’s creditors, its liquidator and the Belgian state €18.3 million in provisional damages.

Spain's unemployment rate soared back above 20% in the last three months of 2010 as more than 138,000 jobs were lost, casting doubts about the strength of the ongoing recovery in the euro zone's fourth-largest economy, data released Friday by the country's statistics institute INE shows. Fourth-quarter unemployment stood at 20.3%, up from 19.8% in the third quarter, and the highest level since the second quarter of 1997, when it was at 20.7%. The third-quarter decline had been the first since the rate started a continued rise in the second quarter of 2007, from well below 10%.

The global economic crisis has forced policy makers to confront a long-simmering problem fraught with political danger: the growing burden that public pension systems are placing on government budgets in an era of large deficits and mounting debt, The Wall Street Journal reported. With the global elite gathered in Davos, there was much fretting about the threat to the developed world's public finances posed by their aging societies and slow post-crisis economic growth. Doubts about governments' ability to pay pension benefits are central to these worries.