Headlines

Canadian drug and medical-device maker Angiotech Pharmaceuticals Inc. filed for Canada's version of Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday so it could execute a debt-for-equity swap that hands control of the company to certain bondholders, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The filing comes after the Vancouver company attempted for months to execute the swap outside of court, and two days before a deadline to make a $9.7 million interest payment.

Felix Dornaus is holding onto Ivory Coast notes trading at 38 percent of face value even as the world’s biggest cocoa producer slides closer to default on $2.3 billion of debt, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported. “I expect them to miss the deadline and technically they will go into default, but at the end of the day they will pay the debt,” said Dornaus, who helps manage about 1.4 billion euros ($1.9 billion) in emerging-market debt at Erste Sparinvest KAG in Vienna. The payment owed is “really peanuts for them, the money is there,” he said.

A Canadian public-sector pension fund has joined a forestry management firm in a C$415 million (A$415 million) acquisition of Australian timber lands, capitalizing on a failed government investment scheme, the companies said on Thursday, Reuters reported. Alberta Investment Management Corp and a fund run by Australia's New Forests Pty Ltd are buying the timberland assets of Great Southern Plantations, which include more than 2,500 square km (965 square miles) of land in forestry and agricultural regions in six states. The pair are buying the assets out of receivership.

The Central Bank has lowered its main policy rate by a quarter percentage point, in a move meant to afford Treasury and businesses cheaper access to credit, Business Daily Africa reported. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) announced on Thursday after its bi-monthly meeting that it had cut the Central Bank Rate to 5.75 per cent. Interest rates have been on the rise in the past two months as investors demanded higher returns on Treasury bonds following the State’s announcement that it would increase its domestic borrowing target by 14 per cent to Sh120 billion this year.

Reorganized newsprint maker AbitibiBowater Inc. filed a motion to dismiss the Chapter 11 case of subsidiary Bowater Canada Finance Corp, Bloomberg reported. Although affiliates implemented their U.S. and Canadian reorganizations in December, the BCFC affiliate was dropped out because creditors of the subsidiary voted down the plan. It was agreed at the time with BCFC noteholders that the subsidiary’s U.S. Chapter 11 case would be dismissed, as would the arrangement proceeding in Canada.

China said Thursday that for the first time it would allow some cities to impose a property tax on homeowners in the hope of curbing speculation in the housing market and also reducing the government’s reliance on land auctions for income, the International Herald Tribune reported. China’s State Council, or cabinet, announced the decision a day after releasing a broader set of measures aimed at taming housing prices and preventing a property bubble from threatening the nation’s fast-growing economy.

Spanish savings bank La Caixa plans to transfer its banking business to listed unit Criteria CaixaCorp SA, in a restructuring effort to improve management and its access to capital markets, The Wall Street Journal reported. Such a move by Barcelona-based La Caixa, the biggest and healthiest of the large savings banks, could set an example for other cajas to follow, analysts say.

Vitro SAB, Mexico’s largest glassmaker, agreed to dismiss the Chapter 15 petition it filed in New York in mid-December, according to a document submitted yesterday to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Fort Worth, Texas, where bondholders filed involuntary Chapter 11 petitions a month earlier against Vitro’s U.S. subsidiaries, Bloomberg reported. Vitro was forced into dismissing the Chapter 15 case following a ruling from a court in Mexico this month dismissing Vitro’s attempted reorganization under that country’s version of Chapter 11.

The Polish government has come up with a plan to plug its yawning budget gap by reducing the share of social security contributions it transfers to private pension funds. Poland’s move isn’t nearly as drastic as the measures taken in Hungary, but it met with fierce criticism nonetheless, The Wall Street Journal New Europe blog reported. In Poland, a fixed proportion of workers’ salaries is withheld as contribution to the country’s pension system. Most of that stays with the government and is used to pay out pensions to people already retired.

The besieged pub sector has gone from bad to worse with industry claims that up to 90 per cent of pubs currently on the market are facing some sort of financial pressure, The Australian reported. The estimate, along with 2011 forecasts of a further softening of yields -- which have already caused a 40 per cent fall in pub values -- is the latest setback for the debt-laden sector which last week claimed its latest scalp, Sydney's Icon Hospitality Group of companies.