Mexico

Mexican homebuilder Geo has called a meeting to present a debt restructuring plan, which it hopes will be approved by the majority of its creditors, the company said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The meeting will be on May 6 in Mexico City, Geo said in a notice to the Mexican stock exchange. The company, whose shares have been suspended since 2013 for not reporting financial statements, entered into bankruptcy protection last April.

Debt-saddled Mexican homebuilder Desarrolladora Homex said Monday that it is back in the good graces of Mexican mortgage institution Infonavit, which extends the majority of home loans in the country, The Wall Street Journal reported. Homex said it has reached an agreement with Infonavit so that the builder can once again sell homes to Infonavit borrowers.

Mexico kicked off the opening of its oil industry to great fanfare. At a packed event at the Technology Museum here seven months ago, maps flashed on a giant screen showing dozens of oil fields that would be put up for bid to private companies for the first time in more than 75 years, the International New York Times reported. With oil fetching around $100 a barrel at the time, the projections were ambitious. Over the next four years, Mexico would attract more than $12 billion in investment a year. By 2018, private companies would be pumping half a million new barrels of oil a day.

AT&T Inc said on Monday it would buy bankrupt NII Holdings Inc's wireless business in Mexico for $1.875 billion in a move to create a larger Mexican wireless player that will have a better chance of competing with No. 1 America Movil, Reuters reported. NII Holdings, the parent of Nextel operators in Latin America, filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States in September after struggling with $5.8 billion in debt and fierce competition in Brazil and Mexico. It is still exploring options for its larger Brazilian operations.

Latin America is turning into the world leader in corporate-bond defaults, Bloomberg News reported. Four companies in the region have skipped dollar-denominated debt payments this month, more than any other area and almost half the total in all of 2014. In a sign bond investors are increasingly concerned about Latin American companies’ ability to repay debt, borrowers led by Mexico’s oil-rig operators have pushed the amount of the region’s bonds trading at distressed prices to $58 billion, about a third of all emerging-market debt trading at such levels.

Altos Hornos de Mexico SA, the steelmaker known as Ahmsa, said it asked a judge to end its 15-year bankruptcy following an agreement with a majority of creditors that calls for repayment of $1.7 billion. Creditors will be called to a meeting to confirm their acceptance of the deal, which proposes a three-year payback in pesos, Ahmsa said in a statement today to the Mexican stock exchange. That session would pave the way to exit a restructuring case begun in 1999, the company said.

Mexican homebuilder Urbi has filed for bankruptcy protection to restructure its debt, the company said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The creditors which have so far signed the restructuring plan held some 21.9 billion pesos ($1.55 billion) in debt, equivalent to around 53.3 percent of the total claims on Urbi, the company said in a statement. Urbi, Mexico's third-largest homebuilder in recent years, is following its bigger peers after struggling under heavy debt loads and slumping sales of their cheap, single-unit homes in developments often located far from urban centers.

No one expects Mexico to restructure its debt anytime soon. But if it ever does, so-called vulture investors like Mr. Singer’s Elliott Management will find it much harder to crash the debt restructuring party – as they have done so successfully in Argentina – thanks to tough new provisions written into the contracts of new bond issues for the country, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported.

Mexico is attracting record levels of foreign investment, boasts a stable economy, and is becoming an export powerhouse in areas like cars and aerospace. But when it comes to one economic measure—its minimum wage—the country lags behind only Haiti in the hemisphere, The Wall Street Journal reported. Pressure is rising on the federal government to change that.

Amado Yáñez Osuna, who headed Oceanografía, the oil services company at the center of a $400 million fraud involving Citigroup’s Mexico subsidiary, has been arrested, according to Mexico’s attorney general’s office, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. The announcement, made late Wednesday, suggests that prosecutors are close to building a case against Mr. Yáñez in the scheme, which forced Citi to reduce its 2013 earnings by $235 million. The arrest warrant was issued against Mr.