Headlines

A group of companies trading under the CEA banner--owning 20 mainly southern hotels and bars, and employing about 300 people--have been placed in the hands of receivers, The New Zealand Herald reported. Details issued about 5pm yesterday by the receivers, McGrath Nicol Partners in Auckland, were sparse and did not include a list of the 20 hotels. It is understood several Otago bars are under the CEA umbrella. They include the Speights Ale House and Shooters Bar in Wanaka and the Frankton Arm Tavern in Queenstown.

Wellington-based events organiser Clockwork Events has gone into liquidation owing more than $1 million, but for the upcoming events it has been involved with, the show must go on, The National Business Review reported. The company ran into cash flow problems when several of its confirmed events were cancelled, combined with a significant downturn in sales. According to the liquidator’s first report, Clockwork faces a shortfall of just over $1 million, with less than $50,000 in available funds.

May 8 is going to be D-day for debtor property developer Kelly McEwan when he meets his creditors to try to stave off bankruptcy, The National Business Review reported. The son in father-and-son property development firm McEwan Group is defending two applications before the High Court from finance companies seeking to have him adjudicated bankrupt. The first is an application by financier FM Custodians to have the younger McEwan bankrupted. A second application brought by finance company Hannover went before the High Court at Auckland today.

Bankrupt mining firm Asarco LLC has filed the disclosure statement for its fourth amended plan of reorganization, which incorporates a judge's approval of a $1.7 billion sale of its operating assets to India-based copper producer Sterlite Industries Ltd., Bankruptcy Law360 reported. In the disclosure statement accompanying the amended plan filed Monday in the U.S.

Nortel Networks Corp., the insolvent telephone-gear maker, won an extra three months to work out a plan that will allow the company to emerge from bankruptcy, Bloomberg reported. Ontario Superior Court Judge Geoffrey Morawetz today agreed to extend the order, which was due to expire May 1, to July 30, following a hearing in Toronto. The order protects the Toronto- based company from creditor demands and lawsuits. Nortel filed for bankruptcy in January in the U.S. and Canada after losing almost $7 billion since 2005.

BTA Bank, Kazakhstan’s largest lender, began talks with creditors to renegotiate payments on as much as $15 billion of debt in a bid to avert bankruptcy, Chief Executive Officer Anvar Saidenov said. “The viability of the institution will depend on how successful we are in negotiating with our creditors,” Saidenov, who is also chairman of BTA’s management board, said today in an interview in London.

With the economic slump prolonged, more and more firms and individuals have become unable to service their debt payments and are filing for court receivership or debt rescheduling programs, The Korea Times reported. According to the Seoul Central District Court, a total of 72 local firms filed for court receivership in the first three months of this year, up 243 percent from the same period last year. The number of filings reached 21 each in the first and second quarter of last year.

The European Commission proposed a draft law on Wednesday that would make it mandatory for hedge funds to register and disclose information on leverage to supervisors if they want to operate in the EU, a Commission official said. The draft law has been subject to intense horse-trading ahead of its publication as Britain, the European Union's hedge fund centre, fears overly draconian rules, while France is a keen backer of tighter regulation. The global hedge fund sector has assets totalling $1.4 trillion, relatively small compared to the wider financial market.

The ESRI (Economic and Social Research Institute) says today that the Irish Economy will shrink 9.2 per cent in 2009, which will be the sharpest fall in economic growth experienced by an industrialised country since the Great Depression, Finfacts Ireland reported. The ESRI says employment in 2009 will be 187,300 lower than in 2008, on an annual average basis. The ESRI says the implications of the downturn for employment are highly negative. It expects employment in 2009 to be 187,300 lower than in 2008, on an annual average basis.

Can we afford to fix our financial systems? the Financial Times asks. The answer is yes. We cannot afford not to fix them. The big question is rather how best to do so. But fixing the financial system, while essential, is not enough. The International Monetary Fund’s latest Global Financial Stability Report provides a cogent and sobering analysis of the state of the financial system. The staff have raised their estimates of the writedowns to close to $4,400 billion (€3,368 billion, £3,015 billion).