Headlines

General Motors Co. said Thursday it had made a decision on the future of German unit Adam Opel GmbH and its U.K. sister company Vauxhall, as people familiar with the matter told Dow Jones Newswires that GM's board had recommended a sale to a consortium led by Canadian car-parts maker Magna International Inc. GM will disclose its decision at 1400 GMT at a press conference in Berlin. A person familiar with the situation told Dow Jones Newswires that GM's board is recommending a sale to Magna, which is being backed by Russia's largest bank, OAO Sberbank and automaker OAZ Gaz.

Talks on continuing to finance the factoring business of Quelle, a mail order retailer belonging to insolvent group Arcandor AG, are progressing in a "constructive" manner, a spokesman for the insolvency administrator said Wednesday. The current financing agreement expires at midnight Wednesday, the spokesman for insolvency administrator Klaus Hubert Goerg told Dow Jones Newswires. Factoring - a practice in which banks buy the outstanding accounts receivable to finance the retailer's ongoing operations - is Quelle's only source of financing.

Dutch brokerage Van der Moolen Holding filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday in Amsterdam, ending the 117-year old firm's history after it decided it could no longer meet expenses, and failed to find a buyer, Reuters reported. The broker, once one of the prime market makers on Wall Street, said it could no longer pay ongoing expenses, including salaries, for September.

Trident Resources Corp., a Canadian natural gas explorer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S., citing a drop in prices and fluctuations in the Canada-U.S. currency exchange rate, Bloomberg reported. The company listed as much as $10 million in assets and as much as $1 billion in liabilities in a filing yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware. Lower natural gas prices may decrease cash flow and force a delay in investments, it said in a separate motion to the court. Trident also sought relief from Canadian creditors, according to the motion.

The number of German business insolvencies is rising sharply this year, underscoring government warnings that a wave of credit defaults could trigger a second credit crunch, The Wall Street Journal reported. The German Destatis statistics office said Wednesday that corporate insolvencies filed from January through June jumped 14.8% from the first half of 2008, a trend that economists warn will cut deeply into government tax revenue. Corporate insolvency filings alone in June were up 15.9% from the same month a year ago, compared with a 14.9% annual increase in May.

Koenigsegg Group, the luxury Swedish carmaker, said Wednesday that it would sell a stake to the state-owned Beijing Automotive Industry Holding as part of the Swedish company’s purchase of General Motor’s Saab unit, in the latest push by a Chinese automaker expand outside its domestic base, The New York Times reported. The agreement came just hours after another Chinese carmaker, Geely Automotive, said its parent company planned to bid for Volvo Cars, the Swedish brand that is being sold by Ford Motor.

Australian retail sales came off the boil in July signaling the impact of the government's fiscal stimulus is fading quickly, and calling into question market expectations of a rise in interest rates in coming months, The Wall Street Journal reported. Housing finance also weakened in July, its first monthly drop since September 2008, evidence that recent widespread talk of rising interest rates may have put a brake on demand.

Global drinks giant Diageo PLC Wednesday rejected proposals from the Scottish government designed to safeguard the jobs of Scottish workers and said talks on the issue are now closed, Dow Jones reported. "We examined the alternative proposals thoroughly," said David Gosnell, Diageo's managing director for global supply. "They don't deliver a business model that would be good for either Diageo or Scotland." The proposals from the Scottish government set out to use public money to protect 900 workers, whose jobs are under threat from Diageo's planned restructuring.

Creditors' trusts are becoming more common in their use as companies seek to quickly distance themselves from the voluntary administration process and continue on with their corporate lives, Mondaq reported. This is often for legitimate reasons, the most common being for publicly listed companies seeking to minimise the impact of voluntary administration on their listed status.

Spansion Inc. has asked a bankruptcy judge to put a halt to a patent infringement suit filed against it in Germany by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. over the manufacture and sale of flash memory chips, citing the automatic stay in the technology company's bankruptcy proceedings, Bankruptcy Law360 reported. Read more. (Subscription required.)