Headlines

Tomato processing company Cedenco Foods Australia has been placed into receivership but its processing facility will operate as usual, the Brisbane Times reported. This comes after Cedenco Foods in New Zealand was placed in receivership. The company continues to trade pending a sale of the business. ANZ Banking Group NZ subsidiary, ANZ National Bank, said on Monday that it had put receivers into Cedenco Foods. Announcing the move, ANZ National said it had committed seasonal funding to the receivers to allow Cedenco to continue to trade.

General Motors Europe head Carl-Peter Forster is quitting in disgust at GM's decision to hang on to its European unit Opel/Vauxhall, a well-informed source told Agence France-Presse on Friday. The source confirmed a report in the Spiegel magazine, saying: "I expect a withdrawal by Forster within a week." GM executive vice president David Reilly would replace Forster, as GM seeks to soothe anger over its decision to abandon this week a sale of Opel to Canadian group Magna and Russian partner Sberbank, Spiegel said. Forster was a keen supporter of Magna's bid.

U.K. carrier British Airways PLC Friday posted its worst first-half results in history and now is targeting almost 5,000 job cuts by the end of the fiscal year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The airline aims to ax 4,900 positions as it widens its savings plan beyond the U.K. It shed 1,900 workers in the first half and now intends to cut a further 3,000 personnel world-wide by March 31. Of that total, 3,700 job losses will be in the U.K. BA currently employs 38,704 workers. The move likely will increase union anger.

Creditors of Saad Investments Company Ltd (SICL) held their first official meeting on Thursday, accountancy firm Grant Thornton said, taking a next step in the troubled firm's restructuring process, Reuters reported. Banks are seeking repayment of a loan of up to $2.8 billion taken out in 2007 by Cayman Islands-registered SICL, a unit of Saudi investment firm Saad Group. Regulators and bankers are grappling with up to $22 billion of debt restructurings at Saad and a second Saudi firm, Algosaibi, viewed by some as the biggest financial blow to the region since the global credit crisis began.

Former clients of Lehman Brothers' European arm were struck a further blow Friday when the U.K. Court of Appeal rejected an appeal from the bank's administrators to use a bespoke legal tool to expedite the return of $9 billion in client assets, The Wall Street Journal reported. PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PwC, had appealed to the court last month to be granted permission to use a legal tool called a "scheme of arrangement." The tool was designed to speed up the return of assets by dealing with Lehman's clients collectively, rather than negotiating bilateral agreements.

KPMG, the administrators of First Quench Retailing, which owns British off-license chains Threshers and Wine Rack, said on Thursday that 373 stores within the group will close, leading to over 1,738 job losses, Reuters reported. First Quench Retailing, which went into administration last week, operates around 1,200 stores in Scotland, England and Wales and employs 6,300 people. Richard Fleming of KPMG said 247 of the stores will continue to operate until Nov. 25 and 126 until Dec. 2. He added liquidation sales will take place at the loss-making stores, which are to be announced on Friday.

The number of German companies filing for bankruptcy protection was up 12.3 percent on the year in August, even as the economy slowly emerged from recession, official data showed Friday, BusinessWeek reported on an Associated Press story. Courts registered 2,619 bankruptcy filings in August, the Federal Statistical Office said. Over the first eight months of the year, 21,807 bankruptcies were registered. Germany's export-fueled economy, Europe's biggest, returned to modest growth in the second quarter following a deep recession.

Megha Mittal will buy insolvent German luxury fashion house Escada for an undisclosed price, the company said on Thursday. All key assets of Escada's operating business as well as shares in its subsidiaries will be transferred to Mittal's trust, excluding those that serve as guarantor for the Escada bond, Reuters reported Escada, once one of the world's top fashion labels, filed for insolvency in August after years of diminishing sales took their toll and a broad restructuring plan failed to win approval from bondholders.

A record number of people were declared insolvent in England and Wales in the third quarter of 2009, according to figures from the Insolvency Service, the BBC reported. There were 35,242 personal insolvencies, up 28% from the same period last year and an increase of 6.6% on the previous three months. This extended the record number which was reported earlier this year. The record numbers are due in part to the number of people who have found themselves out of a job during the recession, but with debts to pay off.

The number of company liquidations in England and Wales in the third quarter of 2009 fell 4.7% on the previous quarter - the first time the rate has fallen this year and possibly a sign that the impact the economic crisis has had on U.K. companies is starting to abate, Dow Jones reported. However, the 4,716 compulsory company liquidations in the third quarter, adjusted on a seasonal basis, still represents an increase of 14.6% on the same period a year earlier, data from the government's Insolvency Service showed Friday. Liz Bingham, U.K.