New Zealand

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.

Central banks world-wide delivered sweeping interest rate cuts Thursday, even as the continuing turmoil in credit markets means cuts in rates are losing their power to curtail an accelerating global slowdown, The Wall Street Journal reported. Major European central banks, including the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and Sweden's Riksbank joined the central banks of New Zealand and Indonesia in making deep rate cuts. The goal: to stave off deep and painful slowdowns in the wake of financial market turmoil that has squeezed lending globally.

An investor group is going to court to try to delay Tuesday's vote on a restructuring proposal for failed New Zealand finance company Hanover, The National Business Review reported today. The group has also asked the Minister of Commerce to put Hanover into statutory management. The group expects a hearing to be held at the High Court in Auckland on Monday. Hanover Finance is aiming to repay nearly 16,400 secured deposit investors their principal of more than $550 million within five years, under the debt restructure proposal.

Centro Properties Group, the owner of 794 shopping malls in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, is continuing talks with lenders to extend more than $4.5 billion of borrowings by Dec. 15 after failing to raise new capital, Bloomberg reported. The real estate investment trust may have to go into receivership unless creditors including Commonwealth Bank of Australia Ltd. and National Australia Bank Ltd. agree to roll over loans, Melbourne-based Centro said today in a statement.

Failed New Zealand finance company Hanover's secured investors could be repaid little more than half their capital under a five-year moratorium proposal put forward by the company yesterday, according to two independent reports, The Dominion Post reported today. The company's expectations to repay secured investors all their principal were too optimistic and there was a risk that lower-ranked investors, facing the prospect of losing all their money, could instead try to force the company into liquidation, independent evaluation reports show.

Investors in stricken finance company Dorchester Pacific will have to wait a little longer for details of management's restructuring plan, which the company yesterday said would see them get all their money back over a three-year period, the New Zealand Herald reported today. A day after St Laurence Finance and Investments, with whom Dorchester's fate is entwined, announced details of its own imminent restructuring proposal, Dorchester's management said their plan was "now well advanced".