Headlines

Listed agricultural property investment company ARK Fund has been put into voluntary administration, following the path of associated private entity Rewards Group, Western Australia Business News reported. ARK Fund advised the ASX today that Kim Strickland and David Hunt of WA Insolvency Solutions had been appointed after National Australia Bank ended an arrangement that had bought the property group time to restructure via a proposed merger with a recapitalised Rewards Group.

TNK-BP, a joint venture between Britain's BP and a group of Russian billionaires, said on Thursday that its unit which holds the license to the vast Kovykta gas field had filed for bankruptcy, Agence France-Presse reported. TNK-BP said the RUSIA Petroleum unit is unable to pay off debts to its parent company. "The current financial situation precludes RUSIA Petroleum from timely repayment of its loans to TNK-BP Group," the company said in a statement. The loans were made to the subsidiary to finance the development of the vast Kovykta gas field, it said.

As the European Union's executive arm introduced a raft of policy ideas aimed at improving management of banks, European governments weighed in with proposals that illustrate ongoing tensions between national and international efforts at financial regulation, The Wall Street Journal reported. The swirl of sometimes contradictory proposals to stave off future financial crises came out of Europe ahead of a meeting this week of finance ministers of the Group of 20 leading economies to discuss financial regulation in Busan, South Korea.

Department store chain Karstadt's insolvency administrator has met with German retailer Metro, a spokesman for the adminstrator said on Wednesday, The Guardian reported on a Reuters story. Metro has said repeatedly over the past year it could be interested in acquiring some of Karstadt's 120 stores to beef up Kaufhof, which it wants to sell to focus on the its wholesale cash & carry and its consumer electronics business. The spokesman was responding to a report from German newspaper publisher WAZ-Mediengruppe that Metro was in talks over Karstadt.

Alliance Bank, Kazakhstan's sixth-largest lender by assets, plans to issue $1 billion of recovery notes with a maturity of seven years as it returns to profit this year following its debt restructuring, Reuters reported. Alliance, the first of four Kazakh banks to default on its debt, expects a profit of 448 billion tenge ($3.0 billion) in 2010, Chief Executive Maksat Kabashev said on Tuesday. He said the following three years would also be profitable.

Great River Journey, a First Nations tourism venture that sold $1,000-a-day wilderness tours on the Yukon River, has been given more time to come up with a bankruptcy protecton plan, CBC News reported. Yukon Supreme Court Justice Leigh Gower granted Great River Journey, which filed for bankruptcy protection last month, 45 more days to work out a plan. The company has more than $10 million in debts, and it is seeking $2.5 million to relaunch, president George Asquith said Monday.

ABC Learning creditors have voted to wind up the failed childcare group following the longest administration in Australian corporate history, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. Fifteen people attended today's creditors' meeting in Brisbane to decide on the company's liquidation and to receive a report from administrators. The decision to liquidate the group comes 19 months after the once-profitable business empire started by Eddy Groves was placed into voluntary administration. ABC Learning was at one stage the biggest listed childcare operator in the world.

Germany's biggest cable network provider Kabel Deutschland Holding AG said Tuesday it is interested in buying assets from peer PrimaCom AG, which may face insolvency. PrimaCom has 700,000 to 800,000 customers in the area where Kabel Deutschland operates, a Kabel Deutschland spokeswoman told Dow Jones Newswires. Germany's three major cable network companies, Kabel Deutschland, Unitymedia--a unit of Liberty Global inc.

Caught between a populace resistant to more austerity measures and investors demanding budget cuts and more flexible labor markets, the Spanish government is finding it increasingly difficult to keep a grip on power, The New York Times reported. Last week, the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero narrowly won approval for an extra 15 billion euros, or $18.4 billion, in spending cuts — in an effort to bring the budget deficit down to 6 percent of the national economic output by 2011, from 11 percent last year. With labor unions and business leaders at loggerheads, Mr.

Dubai International Capital, an investment arm of conglomerate Dubai Holding, has asked lenders for a three-month extension on some of its debts, underscoring the financial challenges still facing the city-state, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The news comes six months after Dubai's much larger conglomerate Dubai World shocked markets by announcing a standstill on its own debt pile. Last week, Dubai World said it has agreed in principle with its main creditors to restructure $23.5 billion of debt and said it would seek a final deal with all its creditors by the end of June.