United States

The National Asset Management Agency has taken a fresh legal challenge against property developer Sean Dunne in a bid to stop him walking away from debts of more than €700 million in the United States, the Irish Times reported. The State loans agency, which has a judgment debt of €185 million against Mr Dunne, filed a legal complaint within Mr Dunne’s US bankruptcy proceedings in a Connecticut court seeking to block his discharge from bankruptcy, which would prevent him embarking debt-free on a fresh financial start.

Argentina asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower-court ruling against it in a case over the nation’s defaulted debt, Bloomberg reported. The South American nation claims a federal appeals court in New York was wrong when it ruled in October that investors in restructured Argentine debt can’t be paid unless holders of the nation’s defaulted bonds, led by billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. and its NML Capital Ltd. unit, are also paid.

More than 1,000 creditors of the European operations of failed U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers will share a 3.5 billion pound ($5.5 billion) payout next week, its administrators said on Thursday, Reuters reported. The payout means the recovery so far for creditors from one of the banking collapses at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis is 68.5 cents in the dollar. PricewaterhouseCoopers, joint administrators for Lehman Brothers International (Europe), said a dividend of 43.3 percent of what creditors were owed - the second so far - would be paid on June 28.

A U.S. judge Tuesday approved Arcapita Bank B.S.C.'s plan to gradually liquidate itself in a process that conforms with Islamic Shariah law, which generally prohibits borrowing money with interest, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Bahrain investment firm entered bankruptcy protection last year with a goal of restructuring itself but ended up with a plan to orderly liquidate its private-equity investments.

Seán Dunne faces the possibility of being declared bankrupt in Ireland as well as in the United States after a Connecticut court allowed Ulster Bank to continue its Irish bankruptcy action against him, the Irish Times reported. In a major setback for the Co Carlow developer, the US bankruptcy court in Connecticut, where he now lives, approved an application by Ulster Bank - one of his biggest creditors which is owed more than €300 million - to continue with Irish legal proceedings to have him adjudicated a bankrupt in Ireland.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which is already providing Arcapita Bank $350 million in bankruptcy exit financing, is now seeking to give the Bahrain investment firm a $175 million bankruptcy loan that would pay off existing lender Fortress Investment Group LLC, Nasdaq.com reported on a Dow Jones Business News story. In a Monday filing with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, Arcapita said the Goldman loan would pay off the $105 million still owed to Fortress and later convert into the $350 million exit loan that Goldman is already providing.

Japan's Elpida Memory Inc asked U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware on Wednesday to enforce its reorganization plan sale to Micron Technologies Inc, a final step to creating the world's second-largest maker of memory chips, Thomson Reuters News & Insight reported. Boise, Idaho-based Micron has been losing money as the market for personal computers steadily loses ground to smartphones and tablets. Acquiring Elpida will allow Micron to create greater economies of scale and will rank the company behind Samsung Electronics in the memory chip market.

Lawyers for Ulster Bank have applied to a US court seeking to intervene in the bankruptcy proceedings of property developer Sean Dunne so the bank can proceed with its own bankruptcy proceedings against him in Ireland, the Irish Times reported. Ulster Bank said that Mr Dunne’s filing for bankruptcy in the US was the “culmination of extraordinary efforts” by him to “avoid the application of Irish law to an Irish national with respect to Irish debts and Irish assets”.

Micron Technology Inc. moved a step closer to its takeover of bankrupt Japanese memory chip producer Elpida Memory Inc. this week, The Idaho Statesman reported. The Tokyo High Court tossed out an appeal by creditors to a Tokyo District Court's approval of the company's reorganization plan which calls for Micron to take over the Japanese company. Micron’s acquisition of Elpida will give the memory chip company a larger share of the market for dynamic random access memory used in PC’s and mobile devices.

Mexican home builders and their creditors have been hiring U.S. bankruptcy lawyers and other advisers, as the companies struggle with mounting debt obligations, The Wall Street Journal reported. Two of the country's leading builders—Urbi Desarrollos Urbanos SAB and Corporación Geo SAB—missed debt payments in April and have reported dismal earnings. Urbi is considering a bankruptcy filing in Mexico as one option, some people familiar with the matter said. The two builders have tapped a combination of U.S. financial advisers and law firms, according to people familiar with the hirings.