Headlines

South Korean banks will expand their restructuring move to more ailing smaller companies due to a possibility of more potential defaults, the financial watchdog said Monday. According to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), creditor banks plan to implement its corporate overhaul drive by clearing 66 troubled firms and rescheduling debts at 108 companies, Xinhua reported.

Belgian international food retailer Delhaize Group is in talks to buy shops and inventory worth $425 million from South Carolina-based BI-LO, a grocery chain that entered bankruptcy proceedings earlier this year, The Associated Press reported. In a statement Monday, Delhaize Group said it was in non-binding talks to acquire "a substantial majority" of BI-LO's assets. It said the assets to be acquired had revenue of over $2 billion last year. Delhaize said it intends to integrate BI-LO's shops into its Food Lion chain of shops.

As British politicians battle to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility, the country's Treasury chief said he wants to freeze the pay of senior civil servants and the opposition Conservative Party prepared to announce its own measures to trim Britain's record debt load, The Wall Street Journal reported. Treasury chief Alistair Darling wrote to the bodies that review public-sector pay levels in Britain and advised them to freeze the pay of the country's most senior civil servants and curb pay rises of other top government workers, a Treasury spokesman said.

Many struggling British retailers are facing a worse Christmas than last year, when 15 major chains failed, according to insolvency specialist Begbies Traynor, Reuters reported. The company said rising unemployment and fragile consumer confidence would result in many companies entering formal insolvency proceedings within a year.

The Kuwait Islamic investment firm that owns half of British luxury car maker Aston Martin says it has appointed a chief officer to restructure its debts, BusinessWeek reported. The Investment Dar said in an announcement Sunday, the new manager, Mike Grant, brings to the company over 20 years of experience. The company is one of several Kuwaiti banks and investment houses to run into trouble as the global economic meltdown hammered this small oil-rich state in the Gulf.

The IMF forecasts that Spain will be within the group of European economies that recorded a higher rate of bad loans above the European average along with France and Italy, because these countries have a high rate of loans on total assets, according to the Barcelona Reporter. As far as estimates of losses for banks and financial institutions are concerned, their financial losses for the period 2007/10 could be around 412 million euros to 2.3 billion euros, but warned that risks to global financial stability "remains high".

Friedrich Carl Janssen, chairman of insolvent German retailer Arcandor, will resign from his post as of Oct. 31, Arcandor said on Friday. The resignation is largely symbolic, since the supervisory board has not played an active role in managing the retail group since it filed for insolvency in June after its request for state aid was turned down, Reuters reported. Four other supervisory board members also resigned, Arcandor said. Read more.

China's central bank will soon announce bank loan statistics for September, and there have already been press reports that new lending may be increasing again after a lull in July and August, The Wall Street Journal reported. On top of record new lending in the first half of the year, despite a global slowdown, this is provoking new fears of another nonperforming loan crisis on the horizon. The dilemma for Chinese policy makers will be how to deal with that problem.

It did not appear that a single new deal was signed last week at a two-day investment conference in Haiti, the poorest nation in the hemisphere, The New York Times reported. But the simple fact that hundreds of potential investors showed up to network and discuss possible projects created hope in a country that has been long shunned as too unsafe to visit, never mind invest in. Haiti is used to well-meaning foreigners, most of them relief workers, peacekeepers and missionaries. But this was a new group: profit-minded people assessing Haiti based on its bottom line.

Following the late-September announcement of massive layoffs at Russia’s OAO AvtoVaz - 27,600 jobs getting the axe - and Germany’s car-scrapping subsidy recently coming to an end, fears have been ascendant that another wave of job cuts is headed to central Europe’s auto sector, The Wall Street Journal’s New Europe blog reported. Earlier this year car makers in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and elsewhere in the region let go thousands of temporary contract workers, reduced work weeks to four days and some eliminated shifts.