Headlines

A record 33,073 people in England and Wales were declared insolvent during the three months to the end of June, the Insolvency Service said today. The number has risen by 27.4% since the same period last year, as rising job losses and a clampdown on credit have made life tougher for struggling borrowers, The Guardian reported. The number of company insolvencies also leapt sharply, rising by 39.1% year-on-year to 5,055.

Fiat SpA plans to build Chrysler Group LLC vehicles in Italy at the plants it will acquire through its purchase of niche manufacturer Carrozzeria Bertone, according to the Italian government, The Wall Street Journal reported. Fiat, which acquired a 20% stake in Chrysler in June, beat out two other bidders for Bertone's assets, the government said. Bertone helped build such models as the Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint and the Lamborghini Countach before it ran into financial difficulties.

Workers at Ssangyong Motor have been busy cleaning up the plant for the resumption of production after strikers ended a 77-day occupation of the factory, The Korea Times reported. The company hopes production will be normalized in two to three weeks, but experts say the automaker has a long way to go to regain its tarnished brand image and completely resolve disputes among workers. The management decided to submit a self-rescue plan to a court on Sept. 15 for survival, not for bankruptcy.

Plans are being drawn up in Germany to allow banks threatened with bankruptcy to be put into receivership administered by the state, according to the draft of a bill obtained by the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, The New York Times DealBook blog reported. The measures would discourage banks from engaging in the riskiest activities on the assumption that public money would bail them out in times of crisis, the newspaper cited the draft as saying.

UK homeware retailer Focus DIY Wednesday said it has begun an insolvency process that will allow it to shed onerous leases on its closed stores and will prevent the company from being tipped into administration, Dow Jones reported. Focus DIY, which is owned by U.S. private-equity firm Cerberus, said it had written to its creditors explaining its plan to use a Company Voluntary Arrangement, or CVA, to terminate leases on 38 stores that are no longer trading.

The number of businesses and individuals filing for bankruptcy in Spain reached a record 3,285 in the first half of this year, or triple the figure in the same period in 2008, The Economic Times reported. Firms and the self-employed accounted for all but 515 of the filings, the National Statistics Institute (INE) said Wednesday. By industry, 32.1 per cent of the firms declaring bankruptcy in the second quarter were mainly involved in construction or real estate sales, while 24.9 per cent were in industry and energy, and 17.3 per cent operated in the retail sector.

Jobless numbers have made the highest quarterly jump for more than 20 years as the recession finally translated into mass job losses, The National Business Review reported. The number of unemployed jumped from 5% to 6% of the workforce in the June quarter, according to Statistics New Zealand’s Household Labour Force Survey released this morning. The rise was well above average market economists' expectations of a jump to 5.6%. It was also the largest quarterly increase since September 1988, which was in the depths of the long 1987-92 recession.

European house prices fell more quickly in the first three months of this year than even in the fourth quarter of 2008 when global recession struck, a trend that looks set to dim the region’s hopes for economic recovery, the Financial Times reported. The FT’s European House Price Index showed the rate of annual price declines in the 16-member eurozone edging towards the even sharper decreases for the wider European region, driven by substantial house-price drops in the UK.

The Nortel sale, which has emerged as a test of Canadian national economic strategy, will come under the spotlight tomorrow when MPs hold an emergency hearing on the auctioning of the bankrupt company's prized wireless equipment business, The Toronto Star reported. The scene is set for a day of tense, high-stakes exchanges as the Commons industry committee questions executives from Nortel Networks Corp. and Ericsson, the Swedish company that bid $1.13 billion (U.S.) for Nortel assets.

Ending violent, fiery clashes with police and management, hundreds of South Korean auto workers who had occupied a factory here for more than two months agreed Thursday to cease their strike, union and company officials said. Management officials at Ssangyong Motor Company, South Korea’s fifth-largest auto-maker, agreed to retain more jobs in a compromise with union workers to bring to a close the 77-day-long confrontation that turned the plant into a veritable war zone, The New York Times reported.