Paul Godfrey, a veteran media executive with a salesman’s touch, has been given the biggest turnaround assignment of his business career: taking charge of Canada’s largest newspaper chain after a group of investors won the bidding for it, The Globe and Mail reported. The 46 publications, including the National Post, once formed a major piece of the now-crumbling CanWest Global Communications Corp. media empire and were sold Monday to unsecured lenders for $1.1-billion. The deal wraps up an auction process that began when the newspaper unit filed for creditor protection in January.
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Computer chip maker Qimonda North America Corp. is suing its German parent in Delaware bankruptcy court over the parent's bid to recoup more than $1.5 billion in intercompany debts from its North American affiliates, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Qimonda North America said that its corporate parent, Qimonda AG, stripped its North American unit of cash and assets in exchange of "near worthless" notes while loading up its struggling Virginia-based subsidiary with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans it knew it wouldn't repay.
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Barclays Plc, in the midst of a bitter fight with Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. over claims it received a secret multibillion dollar windfall when it purchased some of the investment bank's assets, is suing a group of Lehman's former private-equity real-estate funds now controlled by a real-estate investment firm, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Lehman's bankruptcy case, Barclays says PCCP Mezzanine Recovery Partners II owes its wealth management business $16 million in unpaid management fees.
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When big investors saw Greece falling into deep financial trouble this year, some of them turned to a familiar ally to profit from the nation's fiscal crunch: the credit default swap, The Globe and Mail reported. The swaps, often called CDS for short, are financial instruments that allow investors to place money on the risk that a company or country won't be able to pay its debts. Nowadays, they can place such bet against nearly every country, from economic powerhouses like Germany and the U.S. to those of marginal economic significance, such as El Salvador and Guatemala.
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Canadian pulp-and-paper company AbitibiBowater Inc. has filed a Chapter 11 plan of reorganization that proposes to pay its secured debt in full and would hand equity to its unsecured creditors, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. In a press release, AbitibiBowater said it filed the plan Tuesday with both the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., and the Quebec Superior Court in Canada, where the company's U.S. and Canadian units have each sought protection from their creditors.
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A former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. executive on Tuesday disputed a central claim in Lehman's bid to recover billions of dollars from Barclays Plc, saying there was no secret $5 billion discount in the sale of Lehman's core business, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Lehman and its creditors claim that Barclays reaped a $5 billion windfall in the deal because as part of the transaction, the bank paid $45 billion in cash in exchange for $50.6 billion in securities.
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The sell-off in global markets has accelerated amid fears that the eurozone debt crisis would worsen and that China’s recovery is faltering, the Financial Times reported. From Hong Kong to New York, there was mounting concern that the €110bn international rescue package for Greece would not prevent the crisis spreading from Athens to other highly indebted eurozone nations. The euro dropped to a one-year low against the dollar, European shares plumbed two-month lows and the bond markets of weaker eurozone economies fell as rattled investors sold risky assets.
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Barclays Plc had “a right to walk away” from a 2008 deal to buy bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s brokerage unit and would have if certain assets had been left out, the U.K. bank’s top in-house lawyer said, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. “That was clearly in Barclays’s mind at that point in time,” Jonathan Hughes, Barclays’s global general counsel, told a bankruptcy judge in New York today, referring to the bank’s discovery during the negotiations that Lehman couldn’t deliver all the promised assets.
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The Canadian media landscape is poised for a major shake-up that could result in greater competition as a result of moves by Shaw Communications Inc. and Torstar Corp. to buy the television and newspaper assets, respectively, of Canwest Global Communications Corp., Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. CanWest has been selling assets as part of its ongoing bankruptcy protection proceedings to pay off its creditors. As part of the deal for Canwest's television operations, Shaw has reached an agreement with Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
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