Headlines

GAZ Group, the Russian carmaker owned by billionaire Oleg Deripaska, “officially completed” restructuring 39.2 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) of debt, clearing the way for the government to guarantee its loans, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. “This is a unique transaction because of the large number of participants involved, the large amount of ruble debt and the use of Russian legislation,” Alexander Bazarov, a vice president of OAO Sberbank, which managed the restructuring, told reporters in Moscow today.

Campaigners fighting the closure of a pioneering adoption service have lost their battle. Manchester Adoption Society is to close at the end of this month after more than 45 years. The society, established in 1965 and based in Prestwich, was forced into voluntary administration after being hit hard by the recession, despite a huge fundraising campaign. Bosses needed to raise about £500,000 to save it from closure and a further £10,000 a year thereafter.

Courts in Canada and the United States have rebuffed a British pension regulator's attempt to drag Nortel Networks Corp. into a separate legal battle in the United Kingdom over a multibillion-dollar claim, a Nortel lawyer said, allowing the company to focus on the liquidation of its global assets, The Globe and Mail reported. The British Pensions Regulator had been trying to argue a $3.4-billion claim on behalf of Nortel's 40,000-plus pensioners in the U.K., where Nortel's collapse triggered a pension crisis.

A plan led by Germany and France to bail out Greece with as much as €30 billion ($41 billion) in aid began to take shape amid intense and risky jockeying between Athens and Berlin over timing and terms, The Wall Street Journal reported. Greek officials said they expected to seal a deal by Friday, when Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou meets in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but senior German officials insisted a bailout wasn't imminent.

Hughes Hughes, the bookshop chain, went into receivership last night, putting more than 200 jobs at risk. Difficulties in negotiating lower rents and a collapse in passenger numbers at Dublin and Cork airports, where the majority of its business is generated, were blamed for the insolvency, The Irish Times reported. The company also cited the impact on bookselling of online sales through outlets like Amazon. Insolvency expert David Carson, of accountancy firm Deloitte, has been appointed by Ulster Bank as receiver.

British bar and nightclub operator 3D Entertainment, which owns the Chicago Rock Cafe brand and is 49 percent controlled by Luminar, has been placed in administration, Reuters reported. 3DE, which was spun out of Luminar in 2007, has been hit by rising unemployment in its young customer base. The value of the stake on Luminar's balance sheet at August 2009 was 17.3 million pounds ($26.3 million), plus a small trading debt, said Luminar on Friday. The proceeds of the administration, which will see 31 of 3DE's more than 50 venues sold to U.S.

General Motors Co. is considering putting more of its own money into the restructuring of its Opel unit in Europe in a bid to win €2.7 billion in state aid from European governments, people familiar with the situation have said, The Wall Street Journal reported. According to these people, who spoke in recent days, GM is open to increasing its share of the funding needed to turn around Adam Opel GmbH, the German-based unit that makes up the bulk of its operations in Europe.

The administrators who have taken control of the British edition of Reader's Digest say the magazine will be published at least through an April edition, and that talks are under way with potential buyers, BusinessWeek reported. The British Reader's Digest took shelter in administration, a form of bankruptcy protection, on Feb. 17 because it had been unable to gain agreement on a plan to close a pension deficit. Administrator Philip Sykes of the firm of Moore Stephens said Saturday that there has been "significant interest" from potential buyers, and negotiations were under way.

The auction of Italian cashmere brand Malo is expected for the end of March, followed by that of fashion brand Gianfranco Ferre, one of the commissioners running their parent group IT Holding said on Friday. The Italian government wants to speed up the sale of assets of IT Holding, which has been in administration since last year, according to a trade union leader, Reuters reported. The group has been in the hands of three government appointed commissioners, who have drawn up a sale plan for its assets Ferre, Malo and production unit Ittierre.

American International Group Inc. is in talks to sell a Hong Kong life insurance division to Prudential Plc for more than $35 billion, marking AIG’s largest asset sale since U.S. taxpayers bailed out the company in 2008, people briefed on the matter said, Bloomberg reported. AIG and Prudential aim to reach an agreement to sell American International Assurance Co. in coming days, although the talks could always collapse, the people said, declining to be identified because the matter is private.