Headlines

The High Court has issued orders lifting the debt-ridden Kenya Planters Cooperatives Union out of receivership, the Daily Nation reported. Union chairman Watson Kimathi said the court ruling was “the perfect Christmas gift for farmers”. “We will now resume operations early next year and farmers will be advised when to start delivering coffee,” he said. The union had been under receivership since October 19 because of a Sh700 million debt to the Kenya Commercial Bank. Deloitte Consulting has been running its affairs.

A world-renowned Bath architectural salvage business which has been hard hit by the recession has gone into voluntary administration, The Bath Chronicle reported. Walcot Reclamation, which was set up 32 years ago and counted Prince Charles amongst its supporters, has seen its income take a dive in recent years. Its owners Jane and Rick Knapp said they had been fighting "a losing battle" over the past few months and had had to admit defeat. A notice from the couple on the business's website says they have called in accountancy firm Monahans to oversee the voluntary administration.

About 7,000 people are reportedly affected after Spanish airline Air Comet's fleet was grounded this week by officials over its failure to pay debts, Colombia Reports reported. The low-cost Spanish carrier owes €17 million to Germany's Nord Bank in lease payments and Air Comet says it is seeking to lay off all of its nearly 700 employees. The Madrid-based company - which specialises in cheap flights to Latin America - also says it has filed for bankruptcy.

The Kazakh government has a strategy to rebuild the country's banking sector after its near-collapse over the past year--regulating financial companies heavily during periods of growth but easing restrictions when the economy slows and credit dries up, Dow Jones reported. The proportion of nonperforming loans in Kazakh banks' portfolios shot up over the past two years, to above 30% this year from over 3% in 2007, amid the global economic slowdown and as cheap foreign funding disappeared.

Aiful Corp., Japan’s third-largest consumer lender by assets, won approval from creditors for a debt restructuring plan that will enable it to avoid bankruptcy, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. The Kyoto-based company met with about 70 creditors, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., in Tokyo today and they agreed to allow the company to delay payments on 280 billion yen ($3.1 billion) of loans, said the people, who declined to be identified before an official announcement.

A U.S. bankruptcy-court judge postponed his ruling Wednesday on an application seeking to make the controversial Canadian restructuring plan for C$32 billion in toxic asset-backed commercial paper enforceable in the U.S., Dow Jones reported. Ernst & Young, which was appointed monitor by an Ontario court in March, petitioned the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the southern district of New York to import, in its entirety, the restructuring plan under chapter 15 of the U.S. bankruptcy code. U.S.

Dubai must raise funds to feed its mushrooming debt but the Gulf emirate dreads imposing taxes to avoid breaking a business model that helped turn it from a lazy fishing town to a regional trade and tourism hub, Reuters reported. Selling some prized assets appears to be an easier option. Dubai, one of seven members of the United Arab Emirates federation, and state-linked firms owe an estimated $80 billion of debt borrowed to fuel a boom, when Dubai branded itself as a tax-free destination for foreign workers and businesses.

Nortel Networks Corp., the bankrupt Canadian maker of phone equipment, agreed to sell its unit that provides Internet-calling gear to Genband Inc. for $282 million, Bloomberg reported. Genband, a closely held company based in Plano, Texas, will combine the business with its own Internet-calling equipment unit, according to statements from the companies today. Genband said it is teaming with One Equity Partners to buy the assets.

The International Monetary Fund has turned down recession-battered Ukraine’s plea for a $2bn emergency loan before the New Year, a senior Ukrainian official said on Wednesday, citing his country’s failure to adopt a fiscally prudent 2010 budget and muster political consensus ahead of a hotly contested presidential election, the Financial Times reported.

Foreign investors were a major force in New York’s real estate boom of the last decade, with families and companies from Dubai to Australia swallowing weekend apartments and Midtown office towers. In 2007, the roster of international investors came to include a British firm, Dawnay Day, whose executives had a splashy reputation for spending millions on fine art and yachts, The New York Times reported. The efforts [to regentrify East Harlem neighborhoods], though, didn’t get far before the recession spread across the globe and Dawnay Day went bust.