Headlines

AbitibiBowater Inc. is looking to shed more unprofitable assets, this time proposing a sale of four shuttered pulp-and-paper mills in Canada, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. AbitibiBowater said the deal is part of its continuing efforts to rid itself of "unprofitable and burdensome assets," including the approximately $12 million sale of its recycling business in December. The company said the mills, all built before 1928 and closed between 2007 and 2009, don't represent any strategic or commercial value but rather represent a drain on AbitibiBowater's resources.

Canada's top bankers are pushing back against a crusade for tougher global rules that would govern the financial sector, The Globe and Mail reported. The chief executive officers of the country's biggest banks, fearing that reforms to the global banking industry are being hammered out in haste, are becoming unusually assertive in speaking up about the issue as the G20 summit in Toronto draws near. They worry that the common ground among policy makers could lead to the imposition of punitive rules that harm their businesses.

Capmark Financial Group Inc. won court approval to sell its Mexican nonperforming loan assets to Tesefa SA for about $17 million, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Judge Christopher Sontchi signed off on the sale at a hearing Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., court documents show. Capmark, which earlier received court approval to pay up to $8.6 million in bonuses to insiders it declines to identify, called off a scheduled bankruptcy court auction after the Mexican business failed to draw other bids.

Songbird Peggy Lee never offered herself as an economic forecaster, but her famous 1947 hit song, "Mañana," included such prophetic lines as "My pocket needs some money; once I had some money; my brother isn't working"—all to be attended to mañana. Which seems to be the theme song of Spain's socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Allied Irish Banks (AIB), the State’s largest bank, has transferred its first tranche of loans to the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), The Irish Times reported. Loans with a nominal value of €3.29 billion were transferred yesterday in exchange for Nama securities with a value of €1.9 billion, according to a statement from the agency. Nama applied a discount of 42 per cent to the loans. This was amended from a 43 per cent discount initially announced last week, when the agency said it would pay €1.88 billion for the AIB loans under the first tranche.

The euro has been under pressure this week after media reported Greece wanted to renegotiate a joint EU-International Monetary Fund aid deal reached last month, Reuters reported. Greece denied the reports, but that has had little impact. On Tuesday, the yield spread between 10-year Greek and German government bonds at one point exceeded 4 percentage points, the widest since the euro's launch. Greece needs to sell more bonds to meet its funding needs. It has raised about 23 billion euros of a projected 2010 requirement of 53.2 billion euros.

Irish house prices may continue to fall for another 18 months according to Brian Lucey, professor of finance at the Trinity College School of Business, Finfacts reported. Lucey says in a commentary in the latest Daft.ie report that on the basis of a straight line projection of average declines in value since the peak, another 18 months of declining prices would be expected."That would be 50 months of house price falls, or just over 4 years, towards the lower end of historical experience.

Quinn Insurance has said it was not obliged to disclose the existence of the controversial loan guarantees on its subsidiaries’ assets in solvency returns supplied to the Financial Regulator, The Irish Times reported. Last week the regulator applied to the High Court to have provisional administrators appointed to Quinn Insurance because of solvency concerns arising from the existence of the guarantees, which were given to lenders to the Quinn Group.

Some of the world's biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG, are fighting Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s plan to spin off an asset management unit, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The banks say the proposal, which Lehman will use to repay creditors owed hundreds of billions of dollars, is being rushed and appears to be unfair to certain Lehman creditors. The objection to the plan, filed Monday afternoon with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, comes as Lehman is set to go to court next week to ask a judge to sign off on the proposal.

There was a 34 per cent increase in the number of companies placed in liquidation, receivership or examinership in the first three months of the year when compared with the same period last year, The Irish Times reported. Figures compiled by the FGS accounting and consultancy firm show 469 companies were placed in liquidation, receivership or examinership in the period compared to 351 in the same part of 2009. The ongoing contraction in the construction/property development sector was obvious from the statistics, with the sector accounting for 177 of all failures.