A second Calgary junior oilsands producer has been granted court protection from creditors as low oil prices and investor disinterest prevent recharging capital resources, The Calgary Herald reported. In a news release on its website, private Laricina Energy Ltd. reported that it has been granted Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act protection by the Court of Queen’s Bench. PricewaterhouseCoopers has been appointed monitor.

Best Buy Canada, a unit of Best Buy Co., said it will close 66 of its Future Shop electronics stores, or roughly half, while firing 1,500 full- and part-time workers and taking a restructuring charge of as much as $280 million, Bloomberg News reported. Best Buy said in a statement released Saturday that the cost of the consolidation will reduce earnings in its 2016 fiscal year by as much as 20 cents a share. The company, which has pushed to cut costs in its U.S. operations, said it doesn’t expect the move to affect earnings in later years.

The nasty battle between Argentina and a group of New York hedge funds has claimed another victim: Citigroup. The bank said on Tuesday that it would shut its custody business in Argentina after a federal judge in New York last week rejected its request to lift an order that prevented the bank from making interest payments to investors holding $2.3 billion in Argentine notes, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported.

Former Anglo Irish Bank chief executive David Drumm has made an emergency request to a US court seeking more time to file legal papers arguing why it should overturn a ruling blocking a write-off of his debts, the Irish Times reported. Mr Drumm asked for the deadline to submit his appeal brief, due this week, to the Massachusetts District Court to be put back to April 13th arguing that he should be given the time because he has hired a new lawyer. The former banker also wants permission from the court to increase the page limit for the brief to 40 pages, or 19,000 words.

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.

The debt burden among Canadians has hit a fresh record high as nagging household imbalances begin to feel the pinch of a new problem: Slower income growth, The Globe and Mail reported. Debt imbalances are measured chiefly by the ratio of total household credit-market debt (mortgages, other loans and credit cards) to disposable income, and that ratio hit 163.3 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year, up slightly from the previous record 162.7 per cent in the third quarter, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

Australia's IFM Investors said on Thursday it had agreed to pay $5.73 billion to buy the bankrupt operator of a major U.S. toll road, making its biggest overseas investment, Reuters reported. IFM Investors, which is owned by 30 Australian pension funds and manages $43 billion, said the purchase of ITR Concession Co LLC gave its investors access to core infrastructure in the world's largest capital market.

Steel pensioners from Hamilton are going to court to save a key protection for retirees whose employers go bankrupt. They're rallying behind a little-known legal principle in Ontario that says amounts owed to a pension plan by a bankrupt employer become claims ranking ahead of secured creditors against some assets. A recent Superior Court decision threatens this so-called deemed trust principle by holding the trust is only created if the employer winds up its pension plans before going bankrupt.

Target Canada suppliers have a long list of questions they want the insolvent retailer to answer — 61 in all. The questions centre around the timing of the insolvency, declared Jan. 15, the Toronto Star reported. Target is in the process of liquidating all 133 stores across Canada. “When did Target Canada and Target Corporation first begin considering closing down its Canadian stores and seeking insolvency protection,” reads one of the questions. Ontario Superior Court justice Geoffrey Morawetz ruled on Feb. 19 that suppliers had until Mar.

Financial institutions are at the epicentre of the financial storm in the Caribbean. Take the case of Sagicor Financial Corp., a leading regional life insurer, based in Barbados. Because the country’s sovereign debt has been downgraded several times, Sagicor’s corporate debt rating has also suffered. In January, the company abruptly announced it was relocating its head office outside of Barbados, shocking the island’s 290,000 citizens. Canadian lenders have it even worse. Our banks are often praised for sidestepping the U.S.