South America

Jaguar Mining Inc., the operator of two Brazilian gold mines, filed for bankruptcy protection in Canada as it tries to restructure its debt, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Jaguar started proceedings under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act in Ontario, the Toronto-based company said yesterday. The company said its recapitalization plan has the support of bondholders who collectively hold about 93 percent of Jaguar’s 4.5 percent convertible notes due Nov. 1, 2014 and 5.5 percent notes due March 31, 2016.

OSX Brasil SA expects a deal in the coming days to delay an interest payment on bonds sold to finance an oil production ship, a move that will help the ailing Brazilian shipbuilder move ahead with a restructuring plan, a senior executive said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. A deal will allow OSX, controlled by tycoon Eike Batista, to put off a Dec. 20 interest payment on $500 million of 9.25 percent bonds due in 2015, Chief Financial Officer Claudio Antonio da Silva Zucker said at the sidelines of an event in Rio de Janeiro. Reuters reported on Dec.

A Venezuelan lender that bid more than €1 billion beat out three big Spanish rivals and three U.S.-based investment firms in an auction to buy a nationalized Spanish bank, the country's bank-bailout fund announced Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Banesco Grupo Financiero Internacional and its Spanish unit Banco Etcheverría SA offered to pay €1.003 billion ($1.38 billion) to buy NCG Banco SA, the largest bank in Spain's northwestern region of Galicia.

Brazil's Petróleo e Gas Participações SA, controlled by former billionaire Eike Batista, started oil production from a second well in its Tubarão Martelo offshore field, according to a regulatory filing on Monday. Output from the OGX-44HP well began on Saturday, the filing said. Petroleo e Gas Participações SA is the new name of OGX Petroleo e Gas Participações, the company said in a statement late Friday. Output from the field's first well, also in Tubarão Martelo, was announced on Friday.

OSX Brasil SA, the financially strapped shipbuilder controlled by Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista, posted a third-quarter loss of 1.84 billion reais ($801 million), Reuters reported. The results came in late on Monday, after a Rio de Janeiro court accepted a bankruptcy protection request from OSX, giving it and two of its three nontraded subsidiaries, OSX Construção Naval Ltda and OSX Serviços Operacionais Ltda, 180 days to prepare a restructuring plan. In the third quarter of 2012, OSX earned 6.92 million reais.

Pensioners in developed economies are no longer being spared the worst effects of the financial crisis as fiscal austerity programmes aimed at curtailing spending on the elderly start to kick in, the OECD has warned, the Financial Times reported. Spending on pensions, which accounts for nearly a fifth of government outlays on average across the 34-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, is being limited through a variety of benefit changes including raising state retirement ages and freezing – or even cutting – payouts.

A judge in Rio de Janeiro on Monday accepted a bankruptcy-protection request made earlier this month by OSX Brasil SA, the shipbuilder controlled by Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista, giving OSX 180 days to prepare a restructuring plan, Reuters reported. The judge, Gilberto Clovis Farias Matos, said the request by OSX and two of its three non-traded subsidiaries, OSX Construção Naval Ltda and OSX Serviços Operacionais Ltda, met the criteria of Brazil's corporate legislation, according to a statement issued by the press office of the Justice Tribunal of Rio de Janeiro state.

A Brazilian judge accepted a request for bankruptcy protection by former billionaire Eike Batista's oil company, OGX Petróleo e Gas Participações SA, but denied the same protection for its foreign subsidiaries, a company lawyer told Reuters on Thursday. OGX sought court protection from creditors on Oct. 30 after it failed to convince them to refinance more than $5.1 billion in obligations, in Latin America's largest-ever corporate bankruptcy filing.

Finding a new partner to develop the $1-billion Capital City Centre, selling off a handful of properties and drastically cutting back operations are all part of a plan to pull the League group of companies out of creditor protection as a going concern, the Times Colonist reported. That was the game plan expected to be unveiled in court in Vancouver today as the League group petitioned to extend the protection it has been granted under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act and extend the debtor-in-possession financing it requires to run day-to-day operations.

OSX Brasil SA, the ship building company of troubled tycoon Eike Batista, filed for bankruptcy protection, the second such filing for a commodities empire that crumbled this year as losses piled up and investor confidence plummeted, The Wall Street Journal reported. "Parts of Mr. Batista´s empire were a house of cards, and now they are falling," said Guilherme Figueiredo, a fund manager at M.Safra & Co. in Sao Paulo who helps oversee $1.97 billion in assets. The move Monday at a Rio de Janeiro court follows a default and bankruptcy filing last month for Mr.