Headlines

British sofa retailer Land of Leather Holding PLC's share price plummeted 32 percent on Tuesday after it said that talks regarding a possible bid for the company had ended, the Associated Press reported. Land of Leather, which has 109 stores across Britain and Ireland and around 950 employees, said it had stopped discussions with "a number" of potential bidders after those early negotiations suggested any resulting offer would represent "insufficient value" for shareholders.

Wagon, one of Britain’s largest car parts makers, has gone into administration, the company announced on Monday. The news puts up to 500 jobs at risk in the company’s two plants in Coventry and Walsall, and its head office in Birmingham, the Financial Times reported. Trading in Wagon’s shares was halted in October, when the company entered into refinancing talks with Royal Bank of Scotland and its majority shareholder, the billionaire investor Wilbur Ross.

European Union antitrust regulators on Friday cleared Bank of America Corp. to buy Merrill Lynch & Co., saying they saw no problems with the $50 billion takeover that will create the largest U.S. financial services company, the Associated Press reported. The deal, announced Sept. 15, is part of the rapid restructuring of the U.S. financial system amid the global credit crisis. The European Commission fast-tracked the takeover, clearing it within a 30-day deadline because it saw no major antitrust issues and received no complaints from rivals or customers.

Taiyo Kogyo Co., a Japanese plastic product wholesaler, filed for bankruptcy protection today with the Tokyo District Court after accumulating 14.8 billion yen ($157 million) of liabilities, Bloomberg reported today. The company made the announcement today in a filing to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The stock will be delisted from the Jasdaq exchange on Dec. 9. Read more.

Hanover Group is awaiting a High Court decision tonight on an attempt by an investor group to delay a vote Tuesday on restructuring the embattled finance company, The National Business Review reported today. The pressure group Exposing Unacceptable Financial Activities (EUFA) is fronting the court action to the media and is arguing that the PricewaterhouseCoopers report on the restructuring proposal is not independent. The injunction seeks to have the vote tomorrow on whether to endorse Hanover's restructuring proposal or put the group in receivership moved to February 16.

Investors in British hedge fund Centaurus Capital have rejected the firm’s restructuring plans for its $1.2 billion Alpha fund, forcing a gradual liquidation, The New York Times reported Friday. The firm had proposed giving investors 30 percent of their cash back and then locking up the rest for two years with reduced fees. The locked-up money was to be deployed in different investment strategies such as credit and distressed debt, Reuters reported. Centaurus failed to get the majority of investors’ support required to implement the plan.

The Canadian subsidiaries of the reeling Detroit Three automakers want a total of at least $6 billion in loans and credit lines from the federal and Ontario governments to stay alive, but won't go into much detail on how they would spend the money, the Toronto Star reported Saturday. General Motors of Canada Ltd., the country's biggest automaker, is seeking $800 million by year's end and $1.6 billion later, while Chrysler Canada Inc. is asking for $1.6 billion, according to sources familiar with the submissions.

Staff from the Financial Services Authority will be flown to New York this week to examine why the US insolvency regime worked better than the British one in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse, the Financial Times reported Sunday. The slow working through of the bankruptcy in the UK is widely believed to have damaged London’s reputation as a financial centre. Read more. (Subscription required.)

The European Commission plans to propose that “fundamentally sound” banks can repay government aid at rates as low as 7 percent, laying the groundwork for approval of plans by France and Austria to recapitalize lenders, Bloomberg reported. European governments are seeking to shore up the financial system after the credit crisis froze inter-bank lending over the past two months. European Union finance ministers asked European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes to impose less stringent repayment conditions on fundamentally sound banks.

Afghanistan’s embryonic financial sector is facing a serious funding crisis that has already forced the authorities to take one of the country’s handful of commercial banks into government control, the Financial Times reported last week. Investigators are still trying to discover what went wrong with the Development Bank of Afghanistan, but international financial officials say it had become saddled with bad debts amid suspicions that it was illegally lending money to its own managers, many of whom have fled the country.