Headlines

Liquidators have been unable to recover any money following the failed multimillion-dollar Walter Peak development, Business Day reported on a Southland Times story. Roderick Nielsen, his brother Greg and another director, Justin Russell, of London, were behind several developments in Queenstown, including the planned $50million Walter Peak project. Rod Nielsen, who bought Walter Peak land for $10m in 2006 and planned to build a luxury lodge, homesteads and cottages, was adjudicated bankrupt in 2009. The company is in liquidation and receivership.

Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday the coalition government would press ahead with plans for public sector pension reform in face of warnings from union chiefs of the biggest wave of strikes in almost a century, Reuters reported. Union bosses have said many of Britain's 6.2 million public sector workers could take part in coordinated strikes later this year over the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition pension proposals.

Hanover Finance's loan to Fijian resort Vatulele has proved disastrous for Allied Farmers with ASB Bank calling in the receivers, The New Zealand Herald reported. The multimillion-dollar loan on the resort, a popular winter destination for New Zealanders and Australians, has been in default for more than two years. ASB, which lent to the project, pulled the plug last week. An Allied Farmers subsidiary is the second secured lender after ASB.

European finance ministers meeting Sunday in Luxembourg moved toward approving a fresh quarterly installment of Greece's €110 billion ($157 billion) bailout loan, but they remained divided over the details of a far harder task—extending Greece a giant new package that would support it for years to come, The Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile, finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven industrialized countries held a conference call late Sunday to discuss the euro crisis, according to people familiar with the matter.

A group of former Halliwells partners have been issued with a demand from the firm's administrators BDO to repay around £21m related to a controversial 'reverse premium' property payout, LegalWeek.com reported. The letters, which were received by a number of former partners this week, demand the repayment of money linked to a multimillion-pound payout awarded to around 40 former Halliwells equity partners. The £24.5m payment was given to Halliwells' equity partners in 2007 when the firm sold a stake in the freehold of its new office in Spinningfields.

One has to hand it to Adnan Al-Musallam, chairman of The Investment Dar (TID), the Kuwait-based Islamic investment company, which owes its creditors over $3.5 billion. Over the last two years, he has fought off any attempt from some creditors to put TID under administration or declare it bankrupt, ArabNews.com reported. He has successfully persuaded the court in Kuwait to give his debt-restructuring plan a chance to the chagrin of a few of TID’s creditors.

Ireland’s “unilateral” bank guarantee of September 2008 was the trigger for subsequent EU-level actions to preserve Continent-wide financial stability, according to Joaquin Almunia, EU commissioner for competition, the Irish Times reported. Speaking to an audience of bankers in Dublin yesterday, the Spaniard repeated criticisms he made earlier in the week of the guarantee. Among other things, Mr Almunia said that it had limited the “margin for manoeuvre to seek burden-sharing from senior bondholders”.

The Afghan government will struggle to pay its bills "within a month" after the International Monetary Fund rejected proposals for resolving the Kabul Bank scandal, western officials have warned, The Guardian reported. Although the war-torn country's biggest bank nearly collapsed last September, the government of Hamid Karzai and the international community are still at loggerheads over plans to fund an $820m (£507m) bailout as well as how the disgraced former managers and shareholders who helped themselves to hundreds of millions of dollars should be prosecuted.

Hong Kong bankruptcy petitions rose 16.2 percent in May from the previous month to 718, but were down 9.5 percent from a year earlier, government data showed on Friday, Reuters reported. The number of bankruptcy petitions totalled 3,375 for the first five months of 2011, down 15.4 percent from a year earlier. Bankruptcy orders totalled 3,356 for January-May, down 14.8 percent from a year earlier. Data on Thursday showed unemployment at 3.5 percent in March-May 2011.

Germany wants Europe to postpone a new bailout deal for Greece to buy time for a compromise on involving private creditors that does not look like a climbdown that would entail political risks for Chancellor Angela Merkel, Reuters reported. Merkel will try to resolve this dilemma in talks on Thursday with the European Central Bank's Mario Draghi and on Friday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, with the ECB, Paris and European Commission all questioning Berlin's position.