A receiver has been appointed to one of New Zealand's most prolific TV companies, Ninox Television, maker of shows including Location, Location, Location and Sensing Murder, The New Zealand Herald reported. Receiver Stephen Lawrence of PKF Insolvency and Recovery declined to give details about the company and the status of creditors. A Ninox director, John McEwan, said the receivership was part of a restructuring exercise and did not affect the operations of the company.

Investment bank ABN Amro and New Zealand’s biggest retail investment advisory network ABN Amro Craigs could soon be ringfenced into a “bad bank,” put up for sale and forced to cut jobs. Royal Bank of Scotland owns half of ABN Amro Craigs and all of ABN Amro in New Zealand, and its radical restructure is expected to create a separate “bad bank” consisting of unwanted businesses and toxic assets, which is ringfenced from the rest of the RBS balance sheet. ABN Amro Craigs has more than 60,000 retail investor clients, and 300 staff in 17 locations around New Zealand.

One of New Zealand’s main kitchen design, build and sale companies went in to receivership yesterday, The National Business Review reported. Kitchen House has a manufacturing facility in Mt Wellington that manufactures cabinets, bench tops and doors. The company also has seven wholly owned super stores, and a discount factory in Auckland and other North Island shopping areas. BDO Spicers Auckland announced Shaun Adams and Brian Mayo-Smith were appointed joint receivers and managers of the company on February 23.

Australian bank Westpac says it is encountering further stress in its New Zealand business, The National Business Review reported. The statement was made as part of an update to the Australian market in which Westpac forecast a $A1.2 ($NZ1.52) billion profit in the three months to December 31, down 2 percent on last year. The statement shows a steep increase in the number of New Zealanders with mortgages 90 days or more in arrears. At the end of December, 0.66 of a percent of Westpac's New Zealand mortgage book had payments 90 days or more in arrears.

Australia’s A$42 billion ($28 billion) stimulus package may keep the nation from sliding into its first recession since 1991 by stoking consumer spending and building schools, roads and hospitals, Bloomberg reported. The Treasury department forecasts Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s stimulus plan will help Australia defy a global recession by creating 90,000 jobs and boosting consumer spending. Almost one third of the package includes cash handouts of as much as A$900 to low and middle-income earners.

Williams and Adams, Wellington's longest established and largest motor vehicle dealership, has gone into liquidation, The National Business Review reported. John Fisk of PricewaterhouseCoopers said Williams family shareholders met yesterday afternoon and passed a resolution to put the company into liquidation. The owners of the fourth generation family business had taken the failure of the business hard, he said. The company employs 115 staff and has 10 sites. It sells Holden, HSV, SAAB, Hummer, Jaguar and Land Rover brands.

Australian Discount Retail Ltd., owner of the Crazy Clark’s/Go-Lo chain of variety stores, will be sold after a syndicate of lenders owed A$96 million ($63 million) appointed a receiver, Bloomberg reported. The first step will be to sell ADR’s Crazy Clark’s/Go-Lo, and Sam’s Warehouse businesses, receiver Ferrier Hodgson Corporate Communications Director Michael Cave said in a telephone interview. ADR, which has 402 stores and 2,700 workers, was created in 2005 by private equity firms Catalyst and CHAMP.

Private equity investors and childcare rivals are looking at making bids for the New Zealand childcare sites of ABC Learning Centres. Offers for its New Zealand assets may land as early as next week from private equity firms and child care operators, the Australian Financial Review reported today.

A Chinese court has declared bankrupt the company at the center of a scandal over tainted milk, blamed for killing six children and sickening almost 300,000 more, one of the company's owners said Wednesday. New Zealand's Fonterra Group said that a court in Shijiazhuang, in China's Hebei province, had issued a bankruptcy order against Sanlu Group Co. in response to a petition from a creditor, the Associated Press reported. The receiver will have six months to conclude the sale process.

Accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers' insolvency practice, headed by receiver John Waller, has earned more than $6 million in fees from work on finance company receiverships, Companies Office filings show. That is more than two-thirds of the $9.2 million or so in receivers' fees charged so far on about 30 finance companies that have failed over the past three years, The New Zealand Herald reported today. The figures do not include hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars more in legal and advisory fees associated with receivers' work.