North Africa/Middle East

Kuwaiti retailer Alshaya has bought 60 La Senza UK stores, rescuing about 1,100 jobs, from the administrators of the stricken lingerie chain, Reuters reported. Alshaya bought the shops and UK brand in a so-called pre-pack deal after KPMG was appointed administrator to the company on Monday. Another 84 stores and 18 concessions had closed, the administrators said, resulting in about 1,300 job losses. The company was owned by Lion Capital, which had announced 81 of the closures on December 30.

The Algerian subsidiary of ArcelorMittal, the iron and steel multinational, faces bankruptcy at its plant in El-Hadjar in the east of the country, a union official said Thursday, Agence France-Presse reported. "The declaration of bankruptcy is imminent. The complex is crushed under a debt of $120 million," the secretary-general of the Smain Kouadria union told AFP, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported.

The UAE’s insolvency laws have been in force since 1993 but lawyers are hard pressed to come up with a single example of their being used to wind down a struggling company. Untested and widely regarded as unworkable, they are in bad need of replacement, the Financial Times beyondbrics blog reported. The juddering impact of the global financial crisis has persuaded the government to draft a new set of regulations, which will hopefully allow companies to conduct orderly wind-downs through the courts. It won’t be easy.

A potential $2.2 billion debt restructuring for Drydocks World, the shipbuilding arm of indebted Dubai World, is seen facing tough headwinds with the presence of hedge funds and a lack of government aid seen threatening an amicable deal, Reuters reported. Drydocks has set up a committee to thrash out an agreement for the restructuring of its $2.2 billion debt pile. The firm missed a payment deadline for a $1.7 billion three-year loan facility that it took in October 2008. It also has another five-year $500 million facility on the restructuring table.

The UAE is in the final stages of framing regulations on insolvency, foreign investment and arbitration, Dr Hadef Bin Jua'an Al Daheri, the UAE Minister of Justice, has told Gulf News. Speaking ahead of the International Bar Association Annual Conference (IBA), which opened in Dubai yesterday, Al Daheri said that the UAE's legal environment has become a role model for the region. "There are some laws that are under study and these include the arbitration law, the foreign investment law and the insolvency law, as well as others.

State-owned Kuwait Airways has delayed plans to privatize the airline and will now push ahead with a restructuring of the ailing carrier, a committee formed for the privatization process said, Reuters reported. The national carrier, which was established in 1954, has been struggling to cut losses and increase revenues amid rising competition from other regional carriers like Dubai's Emirates and Abu Dhabi's Eithad Airways.

Two years after the Dubai debt crisis erupted, contributing to a wave of loan restructurings across the Gulf, those restructurings may be entering a more difficult phase as banks become reluctant to extend maturities further, the Kuwait Times reported. Government-related and private companies in the region have so far avoided defaults by agreeing with creditors to push out maturities-a process labelled "extend and pretend" by some cynical bankers. This method has helped banks avoid billions of dollars in writedowns and companies to avoid the shame of defaulting.

The shipbuilding division of troubled state conglomerate Dubai World said Tuesday it is determined to hammer out a $2.2 billion debt restructuring deal, despite a legal challenge from one of its creditors, CanadianBusiness.com reported on an Associated Press story. The unit, known as DryDocks World, gave no indication when it expected the restructuring to be completed. It has been in talks with lenders for months to retool the terms of the loans, which were excluded from its parent company's own high-profile debt talks.

Local banks in Dubai have sufficient liquidity to weather a global downturn, the chairman of the Gulf Arab's largest bank and a key figure in its recovery from a 2009 debt crisis said on Monday, Reuters reported. Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, who is also chairman of Dubai's Supreme Fiscal Committee, also said some local firms still had a way to go to rebound from Dubai's debt crunch. A deepening debt crisis in Europe as well as a slowdown in the United States have increased odds for another global recession this year.

Dubai has completed the "major bulk" of its debt restructuring and is comfortable in its ability to tap bond markets when it deems it necessary, a top Dubai official said Thursday, Dow Jones reported.