Court-appointed administrators overseeing Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s global bankruptcy proceedings have signed a multilateral agreement allowing them to share information and coordinate the insolvency process as the financial services firm wends its way through more than 75 distinct bankruptcy filings, Bankruptcy Law360 reported.

The holding company for Norwegian-based tape storage company Tandberg Data filed for bankruptcy in its home country court on April 24 after it could not cover a loan payment to New York City-based Cyrus Capital, eWeek reported. Tandberg, a major OEM for both IBM and Hewlett-Packard, becomes the first major storage supplier to file for bankruptcy protection since the recession began last summer. As a result of the legal action, Cyrus Capital will acquire the assets of the company and become majority owner. The new operational HQ for the company will be in Dortmund, Germany.

Invista Real Estate, the UK's largest listed property fund manager, is poised to buy the Asian property business of Babcock & Brown, the Australian investment house that was placed into voluntary administration last month, the Financial Times reported. Invista, which is majority owned by HBOS, is to acquire Babcock & Brown's fund management platform in the region, including offices in Hong Kong and Singapore and more than 20 staff.

UBS, the world's biggest wealth manager, has axed a team of six private bankers in Singapore, who were managing wealth for Turkish clients, sources familiar with the situation told Reuters on Monday. UBS is struggling after losing billions in the risky U.S. housing market, which forced it to obtain financial aid from the Swiss government. The Singapore team was managing clients' assets worth between $200 million to $300 million and was hired from Swiss rival Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) two years ago, a source briefed on the situation said.

The number of consumers in Singapore struggling to pay their credit card bills and personal loans rose in the fourth quarter, data showed on Tuesday, as recession deepened in the city-state, Reuters reported. The proportion of consumers who had delinquent personal loans--due for 30 or more days--rose to 5.34 percent in December from 3.73 percent a year earlier, according to private forecaster Credit Bureau Singapore. The rate rose from 4.24 percent in September 2008.

Singapore, facing its worst economic slump in four decades, changed its law to help people avoid bankruptcy as job losses and loan defaults rise, Bloomberg reported. The nation’s parliament passed a bill yesterday that will allow people with debt of as much as S$100,000 ($66,600) to work out a repayment plan with their creditors without being declared bankrupt, avoiding what the government calls the “attendant disabilities and social stigma” that come with insolvency.

According to a recent study conducted by Asian Banker Research, Malaysia is listed fourth in the Asia Pacific region's most creditor-friendly bankruptcy regimes where creditors can expect to recover more than 80 cents in the dollar of assets they are owed, the Malaysian national news agency reported. The findings of the study released today said Singapore and Japan were Asia Pacific region's most creditor-friendly bankruptcy regimes where creditors could expect to recover more than 90 cents in the dollar. Taiwan came third with a similar rate of recovery with Malaysia.

Singapore Tin Industries (STI)’s facilities in Singapore are being sold off amid what appear to be tensions between the shareholders in the company, which is in receivership, MetalBulletin reported. In a statement, China’s Yunnan Tin Co (YTC), the 42% owner of STI, said the firm had been “running improperly” and that there had been “problems with foreign shareholders”. Sources told MB that YTC was not aware that the Singapore assets were being sold off until tender documents were made public.

Factories in China and India joined much of Europe in slashing output and jobs at a record pace in December, another sign the biggest emerging markets were wilting under the recession gripping industrialized nations, Reuters reported. Economists and policymakers had seen China, Russia, India and Brazil, with their vast markets and rising wealth, as the engines of growth that could save the world from recession. Those hopes are fading fast and forecasts are getting gloomier.

Despite assurances from the developer, Singapore is looking for ways to avoid ending up with a mammoth unfinished project on a prominent piece of land if U.S. casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp. is unable to complete a $4.9 billion gaming venture, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Sands said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week that it was in danger of not meeting obligations to its lenders on a $3.8 billion portion of its debt unless it raises capital, cuts spending on developments or increases its Las Vegas earnings by year end.