Headlines

A bankruptcy protection filing by a relatively little-known Japanese lender sent shockwaves through Tokyo's stock market, as Japan's biggest corporate collapse this year led to a sharp selloff in nonbank lenders. Underlining fears for the health of companies exposed to loans of small firms, which are struggling in Japan's shrinking economy, SFCG Co. said in a statement it filed for court protection from creditors with debts totaling 338 billion yen ($3.63 billion).

As two French banks struggle to weather the financial turbulence, Paris has decided to accelerate their merger, take a controlling stake in the combined company and install a management team of its own, the International Herald Tribune reported. Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said Monday that the French government would inject up to €5 billion, or $6.4 billion, into the bank that will be formed from the merger of Caisse d'Épargne and Banque Populaire, through the purchase of bonds that could be converted into shares.

German corporate sentiment unexpectedly worsened this month to its lowest level since reunification in 1990, dragged down by a bleak assessment of the state of the global economy, a survey showed on Tuesday. Ifo economic research institute said its business climate index, based on a monthly poll of around 7,000 firms, fell to 82.6 in February from 83.0 in January. A Reuters poll of 49 economists had pointed to a reading of 83.0. A measure of current conditions fell, the survey showed, but an expectations gauge rose for a second straight month.

The number of consumers in Singapore struggling to pay their credit card bills and personal loans rose in the fourth quarter, data showed on Tuesday, as recession deepened in the city-state, Reuters reported. The proportion of consumers who had delinquent personal loans--due for 30 or more days--rose to 5.34 percent in December from 3.73 percent a year earlier, according to private forecaster Credit Bureau Singapore. The rate rose from 4.24 percent in September 2008.

Auto industry peers are among the investors who have shown interest in Nordic carmaker Saab, the top executive of General Motors' loss-making unit said in an interview with a Swedish newspaper on Sunday.

SFCG Co., a Japanese lender whose creditors include Citigroup Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection, triggering a slump in financial stocks on concern the country’s deepening recession will cause more failures, Bloomberg reported. SFCG, which focuses on loans to small businesses, listed 338 billion yen ($3.6 billion) in liabilities, making it the biggest bankruptcy by a publicly traded Japanese company in almost seven years. The firm owed Citigroup 71 billion yen as of July 31, according to a filing by SFCG on Oct. 27.

About 40,000 people lost their homes to repossessions in Britain in 2008, a 54% surge from a year ago, the Council of Mortgage Lenders said Friday. The trend is expected to worsen, with a further 75,000 repossessions forecast for 2009, the CML said. In 2007, there were 25,900 repossessions. In the fourth quarter, 10,400 homes were repossessed compared with 11,100 in the previous quarter. Michael Coogan, the council's director general, said there was a sharp rise in people who were simply abandoning their properties. "There may be other solutions," he said in a statement.

An application by Dominion Finance Group’s trustee to have the company put into liquidation has been put off until after investors have had the chance to vote on the scheme, The National Business Review reported. The company trustee Perpetual Trust had applied to put the property lending company, which is already in receivership, into liquidation late last month. The application at New Zealand’s High Court was adjourned until after an investors meeting on April 17. At the time of receivership in September, Dominion Finance Group had outstanding creditors owed $233 million.

There was a time, just over a year ago, when examinerships were seen as a sort of panacea for businesses in distress. But that was when there were relatively few companies petitioning for them, and when they had a very high success rate, The Sunday Business Post reported. That success rate has fallen considerably, to such an extent that the courts have shown real signs of unwillingness to grant protection--but, all the while, businesses are continuing to fail, and are looking for mechanisms to deal with that failure.

The number of insolvencies in Romania is likely to exceed 20,000 in 2009 from 14,500 a year earlier as a repercussion of the global financial crisis, the National Union of Insolvency Practitioners (ANPIR) forecast. Around 1,600 cases of insolvency were recorded in January from 1,000 in the same month of the previous year, ANPIR president Arin Octav Stanescu reported. Debt recovery fell to 2.0 million euros in January from a monthly average of 35-40 million euros in 2007 and 2008.