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The parent company of Montreal’s Just For Laughs comedy festival, Groupe Juste Pour Rire Inc., has agreed to sell select assets as part of a court-directed bankruptcy protection, the Hollywood Reporter reported. Quebec City-based ComediHa! announced it picked up unspecified assets as part of a sale and solicitation process initiated Just for Laughs as it looks to restructure. The sales agreement awaits the approval of the Québec Superior Court, with a hearing set for June 3. Until that court date, both parties said they will not comment publicly on the proposed asset sale.
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New home prices in China rose slightly for a ninth month in May, a private survey showed, driven higher by a slew of supportive steps to prop up the nation's crisis-hit property sector, Reuters reported. The average new home price across 100 cities rose 0.25% on month in May, following a 0.27% gain in April, the data from real estate researcher China Index Academy showed on Saturday. China's property sector, a pillar of the economy, has lurched from one crisis to another since 2021 after a regulatory crackdown on high leverage among developers triggered a liquidity crisis.
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Asset reconstruction companies (ARCs) are being misused by "tainted" promoters to enter the bankruptcy process after leading their firms to loan defaults, a deputy governor at the Reserve Bank of India said, Reuters reported. Promoters in an Indian market are large shareholders who can influence company policy and, according to regulatory definitions, are prospective owners or directors of the company. There is a section under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code "specifically meant to keep out such promoters, said M.
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Japanese companies trimmed capital investment in the first quarter, a result that likely indicates revised data due next week will continue to show the economy contracted in the period, Bloomberg News reported. Capital expenditures on goods excluding software fell 0.5% in the three months through March from the previous quarter following a surge in spending at the end of last year, the finance ministry reported Monday. Manufacturers led the decline, cutting spending by 3% from the prior quarter, while service-sector firms boosted spending a tad.
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Brazilian airline Gol announced on Friday that its board elected Eduardo Gotilla as its new chief financial officer, while also posting preliminary results for April including net debt of $4.5 billion as part of the carrier’s ongoing bankruptcy proceedings, Reuters reported. Gotilla was the CFO of power company Light through last January.
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Scandinavian airline SAS posted a second-quarter pretax loss that more than doubled from a year earlier on Thursday, while pledging to complete its restructuring this summer, Reuters reported. The company's chapter 11 plan of reorganisation was approved in March. It filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection in 2022 after years of struggle with high costs coupled with low customer demand, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. "We look forward to emerging as a competitive and financially stronger airline with a stable equity structure," CEO Anko van der Werff said in a statement.
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South Korea's factory activity expanded in May at the fastest pace in two years on stronger growth in output and orders thanks to broadening global demand, a private-sector survey showed on Monday, Reuters reported. The purchasing managers index (PMI) for manufacturers in Asia's fourth-largest economy, compiled by S&P Global, rose to 51.6 in May, from 49.4 in April, on a seasonally adjusted basis. It was the highest reading since May 2022, and comes after two consecutive months below the 50-mark separating expansion from contraction.
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Creditors have been able to recover nearly half their claims under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) when the resolution has been completed within the 330-day deadline, but delays lowered the proportion of money they got back, The Economic Times reported. Creditors recovered as much as 49% of claims when the IBC process was finished on time, but this dropped to 26% when it took 600 days or more, according to Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) data. The IBC was introduced eight years ago, in May 2016.
Switzerland’s approach to winding down a globally systemic bank such as UBS Group AG has features that could worsen the turmoil in a hypothetical future crisis, according to a key architect of global financial rules, Bloomberg reported. The country’s “Too-Big-to-Fail” regime is too focused on preserving local activities in the event of a break-up, said Paul Tucker, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and a current research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
China’s property slump has weighed heavily on land sales, drying up a key source of revenue for local governments. Now, authorities are looking at an unconventional way to fill up their coffers: data monetization, The Wall Street Journal reported. The protracted property downturn has hit local governments hard, with many struggling under huge piles of debt. What they also have a lot of is data, such as traffic figures showing how many cars are on the roads and in parking lots.