Investors holding notes with a nominal value of USD1.75bn against the UK subsidiary of Petroplus look increasingly unlikely to recover more than a small part of their principal after the administrator of the UK oil refinery business said it had not been able to sell the site after four months of trying, International Financing Review reported. "We have worked tirelessly to explore all feasible options for the refinery. We have had contact with over 100 possible investors and purchasers.

The owner of German department store chain Karstadt, Nicolas Berggruen, is interested in buying insolvent drugstore chain Schlecker, a person close to the U.S.-German investor said on Thursday, Reuters reported. A creditor meeting is scheduled for Friday to decide over Schlecker's future and possibly pick a buyer for what's left of the chain, which has closed 2,000 of its outlets. Daily paper Stuttgarter Nachrichten earlier said Berggruen entered the sales process two weeks ago, bidding between 100 million and 500 million euros ($126-$630 million).

Catalyst Paper Corp, a Canadian paper and pulp producer under creditor protection, will attempt to sell its assets after a proposed restructuring plan failed to win the backing of its unsecured lenders, Reuters reported. The plan won overwhelming support from its secured lenders, but fell slightly short of the two-thirds backing it needed from unsecured lenders, the Richmond, British Columbia-based company said. The company was granted creditor protection in January, as it attempted to restructure its business.

Canada's largest securities regulator alleged Tuesday that Sino-Forest Corp. and certain former executives inflated timber purchases and sales, capping an 11-month investigation into the troubled forest-products company, The Wall Street Journal Deals & Deal Makers blog reported. The Ontario Securities Commission signaled last month it would file fraud allegations against the company, after issuing a so-called enforcement notice. A spokesman for Sino-Forest, which conducts most of its business in China, declined to comment.

A group of Elpida Memory bondholders opposes Micron Technology's offer to buy the bankrupt Japanese chipmaker and has reached out to South Korea's SK hynix and U.S.-based GlobalFoundries to ready a potential alternative plan, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said, Reuters reported. SK hynix, which had dropped out during the second and final round of bidding for Elpida, is interested in the memory chipmaker's Taipei operations, while GlobalFoundries is interested in its Hiroshima operations, said the source, who asked not to be identified.

Home developer Unity Builders Group is seeking creditor protection after betting too heavily on luxury homes and condos in Alberta and the United States, the Edmonton Journal reported. The Calgary-based business, known for its Greenboro brand among others, is $180 million in debt to lending agencies and banks, with almost 10 per cent of that amount owed to trades, according to an affidavit filed by company founder Robert Friesen.

Investors and financial analysts have their eyes on a bankruptcy case, pending in a Dallas courtroom, that they say could systematically shift how American firms do business with Mexican companies, KETK reported. The case also comes at a time when business interests from both sides of the Rio Grande are pushing to include Mexico in the current Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. Mexican glass company Vitro S.A.B filed for voluntary bankruptcy in December 2010, after defaulting on about $1.2 billion in bond debt held by foreign banks, including American interests.

Private equity investor Cerberus has agreed to acquire roughly 22,000 German flats from insolvent Speymill Deutsche Immobilien (SDIC), Reuters reported. As part of the deal, Cerberus is restructuring 985 million euros ($1.25 billion) in SDIC's debt and will inject an undisclosed sum of fresh capital, the administrator and the private equity investor said in a joint statement on Wednesday.

Debt-shackled Jamaica's interest payments as a percentage of gross domestic product were the highest in the world last year even after a domestic debt restructuring two years ago, according to a Washington-based think tank, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. A new report on Jamaica's economy by the Center for Economic and Policy Research says the heavily-indebted Caribbean country's total interest payments were about $1.4 billion in 2011, or about 10 percent of GDP. That's about two-and-a-half times what was spent on capital programs.

MF Global's European administrator KPMG is teaming up with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Lehman Brothers's administrator, to try to speed up the return of assets and cash to former clients of both failed brokers, Reuters reported. KPMG said on Tuesday it will work with PWC to establish whether unsecured funds can be "traced" and treated as if they were secured, following a ruling by Britain's Supreme Court.