La Seda de Barcelona SA late Tuesday said more than 75% of its creditors had agreed to a lockup agreement that allows the loss-making chemical firm to use an increasingly popular U.K. insolvency tool to refinance its debt, Dow Jones reported. The Barcelona-based company is trying to get its lenders to agree to the restructuring of €600 million of its debt by converting €150 million into equity, extending the maturity of €250 million by eight years, and the remaining €200 million by five years. The syndicated loan was signed in London in June 2006, allowing the company to employ the U.K.

Courts in Canada and the United States have rebuffed a British pension regulator's attempt to drag Nortel Networks Corp. into a separate legal battle in the United Kingdom over a multibillion-dollar claim, a Nortel lawyer said, allowing the company to focus on the liquidation of its global assets, The Globe and Mail reported. The British Pensions Regulator had been trying to argue a $3.4-billion claim on behalf of Nortel's 40,000-plus pensioners in the U.K., where Nortel's collapse triggered a pension crisis.

Some of the biggest creditors to the landlords of stricken German department store chain Karstadt are set to approve a landmark debt restructuring plan that could make it appealing to a white knight buyer, Reuters reported. Sources close to the situation said more than 75 percent of noteholders in the 1.2 billion pound Fleet Street 2 Commercial Mortgage Backed Securitisation (CMBS) will agree emergency measures to protect the value of their bonds, boosting Karstadt's survival prospects. If the plan is agreed as seen, this will be one of the largest CMBS restructurings of its kind.

Irish Nationwide has suspended the head of its UK operations as a result of lending practices uncovered by the new management team at the lender, The Irish Times reported. Gary McCollum, who was based in the building society’s Belfast office, oversaw Irish Nationwide’s €4.4 billion UK loan book with Michael Fingleton jnr, the son of the building society’s former chief executive, who worked in the lender’s London office.

The frenzy has left euro zone governments surprised and bruised, and wondering whether there is anything they can do to stop this kind of assault from the financial markets. The answer is probably no, but that doesn't mean they won't try, The Wall Street Journal reported. From the point of view of derivatives traders in Europe, the timing hasn't been good. Just as the decision by Goldman Sachs and one or two other investment banks to pay out billions of dollars in compensation reignited a U.S.

Davos 2010 wrapped up yesterday after five days of yet more soul-searching on how to regulate banking and stop the global financial world creating another crisis, The Irish Times reported. The economic summit concluded with much the same message as last year – governments need to co-operate. What’s different this year is that Davos, with all its aspirations for global agreement, was faced with governments wanting to go it alone. The contentious issue is US president Barack Obama’s planned banking reforms, unveiled just six days before Davos.

Credit Suisse Group AG said Tuesday it would slash the awards of top bankers in London, the first bank to publicly do so in response to the U.K. government's controversial tax on bonuses, The Wall Street Journal reported. The bank said its global bonus pool will be cut by 5%, and the awards for 2009 performance of some 400 managing directors in the London office will be reduced by an additional 30%, as a way to offset the new, one-time bonus tax. The move comes as international will to add taxes on banks, such as the U.K. bonus tax, gathers steam.

A tough new requirement by Britain’s securities regulator that top banking executives and earners must defer 60 percent of their total compensation for a three-year period is pushing some American banks with extensive London operations to say that they just won’t take it anymore, The New York Times reported. Their taxes are on the rise, they have become political piñatas and now, just as one of the richer bonus seasons in recent years gets under way, they are being told by regulators how to pay — or not to pay, to be precise — their employees.

Foreign investors were a major force in New York’s real estate boom of the last decade, with families and companies from Dubai to Australia swallowing weekend apartments and Midtown office towers. In 2007, the roster of international investors came to include a British firm, Dawnay Day, whose executives had a splashy reputation for spending millions on fine art and yachts, The New York Times reported. The efforts [to regentrify East Harlem neighborhoods], though, didn’t get far before the recession spread across the globe and Dawnay Day went bust.

Aidan Birkett, the man charged with sorting out Dubai World's $26 billion debt pile, could face an uphill struggle to restructure the company that's at the heart of the emirate's financial crisis, Dow Jones reported. Birkett, 56, managing director of Deloitte's corporate finance department, was parachuted in last month as chief restructuring officer of Dubai World. He has little time to work his magic, with creditors already baying for blood as the maturity of a $3.52 billion sukuk, or Islamic bond, issued by Dubai World's real-estate unit Nakheel approaches on Dec. 14.