Japan

Commercial RE Co., a Japanese real estate management company whose largest stakeholder is Goldman Sachs Group Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection today, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. The Tokyo-based developer has had to sell assets at a cheaper price, hurting its income as Japan’s real estate market deteriorated following the subprime mortgage crisis, the company said in a release to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Commercial RE had liabilities of 15 billion yen ($159.7 million) as at the end of March, according to the statement.

Struggling Japan Airlines is to cut 45 more international and domestic routes this financial year as it accelerates its plan to return to profitability, it said Wednesday. The airline, being restructured with the help of a state-backed turnaround fund after filing for bankruptcy in January, will slash international and domestic capacity by 40 percent and 30 percent respectively, compared to fiscal 2008, Agence France-Presse reported.

Debt-ridden Japan Airlines Corp (JAL) could miss its June-end deadline for submitting a rehabilitation plan by as much as two months as it deals with local governments opposed to flight cuts, the Nikkei said. The struggling airline's main lenders have said they will not recommence lending unless the company drastically revamps unprofitable flight operations in the restructuring plans to be drawn up by the end of June.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s bankruptcy estate sued three arms of Japanese investment bank Nomura Holdings Inc. in an attempt to wipe out more than $1 billion of claims related to derivatives contracts, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Lehman filed legal complaints Friday against Nomura International PLC in London, Nomura Global Financial Products in New York and Nomura Securities Co. Ltd. in Tokyo, seeking to invalidate large claims the companies made against the investment bank after it had filed for bankruptcy. In each complaint, filed in the U.S.

The decision to file for bankruptcy was not his, the president of language-school chain Geos Corp., Tsuneo Kusunoki, implied in an unusual statement released Thursday, the Japan Times reported. A Geos lawyer explained that because "three directors could not reach agreement" on the bankruptcy filing, the action was not taken by the board of directors but rather by some executives. The lawyer stressed that the process is legal.

Japan Airlines Corp., restructuring under a 900 billion yen ($9.7 billion) state-backed plan, shouldn’t allow government aid to distort competition, the International Air Transport Association said. “Restructuring has to be fast and painful,” IATA Director General Giovanni Bisignani said, BusinessWeek reported. JAL, which was delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange in February, is planning to cut almost a third of its workforce, slash flights and retire older planes over three years to return to profit. All Nippon Airways Co.

Debt-ridden Japan Airlines Corp said it will suspend its scheduled freighter flight services by the end of October and would instead use the cargo belly space of passenger flights, Reuters reported. The airline's passenger flights provide cargo capacity of about three times the volume available on its scheduled freighter flights, the company said in a press release posted on its website.

Cing, developer of well-known video game titles including Little King’s Story, Another Code (Trace Memory), Monster Rancher, and Hotel Dusk, has filed for bankruptcy due to mounting debts it could not pay, Geek.com reported. The small Japanese developer only had around 30 staff, but managed to produce a number of memorable games on Nintendo’s platforms. Its debts were relatively small, standing at just $2.9 million, but clearly that was too much for such a small company to handle, and now it looks as though it will be forced to close.

Japan Airlines Corp plans to reduce its work force by 2,700, or about 5 percent, by offering early retirement, the Nikkei business daily reported. JAL, which employs about 51,800 groupwide, aims to let go 1,700 employees at its core unit, Japan Airlines International Co, and the rest at other group firms, the paper said. The carrier, which did not disclose how much severance pay early retirees are to receive, will start with 400 flight crew and ground staff managers, the Nikkei said.

Japan Airlines Corp., the first major Asian flag carrier to file for bankruptcy, has its last trading day in Tokyo today, wiping out shareholders in a company that was worth more than $6 billion as recently as March, BusinessWeek reported. The carrier will be officially delisted tomorrow after seeking court protection with 2.32 trillion yen ($26 billion) of debts last month. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama forced the bankruptcy in return for backing a $10 billion turnaround for Tokyo-based JAL, the recipient of at least four state bailouts in less than a decade.