United States

Memory chipmaker Micron said the Tokyo district court issued an order approving its acquisition of Japanese memory chipmaker Elpida after creditors agreed to the plan, Reuters reported. Boise, Idaho-based Micron, which is losing money due to a crumbling PC industry, wants to create larger economies of scale and offered in July to buy Elpida for about $750 million in cash and to pay creditors a total of $1.75 billion in annual installments through 2019. Elpida's creditors voted to approve the deal on Tuesday, Micron said.

The Official Stanford Investors Committee and the court-appointed receiver of Allen Stanford's financial empire have sued Antigua and Barbuda, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and 23 former Stanford Financial Group Co executives, accusing them of assisting in the financier's $7 billion (4.5 billion pounds) Ponzi scheme, Reuters reported. The committee is seeking at least $90 million of transfers to Antigua, according to the complaint filed on February 15 in U.S. Federal Court in Dallas. It also is seeking punitive damages.

Bahrain-based Arcapita Bank, the first Gulf company to file for bankruptcy in the United States under Chapter 11 rules, said on Saturday it had submitted a plan to reorganise the company, Reuters reported. The investment firm filed for bankruptcy in New York in March and was given court approval in November to take out a $125 million sharia-compliant loan to provide funding while it restructured its debts. Arcapita's case is being closely watched in the Gulf, where companies have little recourse to orderly ways of dealing with insolvency.

A complex restructuring plan for Punch Taverns, the debt-laden landlord group that owns almost one in 10 British pubs, is likely to face criticism from senior bond holders who doubt the company's claims that it will create a "sustainable capital structure", The Guardian reported.

Boeing Co has sued its Russian and Ukrainian partners in satellite launch service Sea Launch, saying they refused to pay it more than $350 million following the joint-venture's bankruptcy filing in 2009, Reuters reported. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Friday, targeted RSC Energia, a company partially owned by the Russian government, and two Ukrainian state-owned companies, PO Yuzhnoye Mashinostroitelny Zavod and KB Yuzhnoye.

Some global banks are using models that let them hold only one-eighth of the capital held by their competitors against the same assets, according to a new study that will boost claims that banks are manipulating the key measure of bank safety, the Financial Times reported. The study by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision comes at a time when investors, regulators and some bankers have called into question the way banks calculate their risk-weighted assets (RWA), which in turn determine how much capital they have to hold.

It’s a world where an e-mail that takes just six minutes to write costs more than $100, and where just the act of compiling one month’s legal bill – not the bill itself – costs $40,000. Welcome to the high-stakes, high-priced universe of cross-border bankruptcy litigation, where what remains of Nortel Networks Corp. is being slowly drained away by lawyers and consultants, The Globe and Mail reported. Nortel’s bondholders, pensioners and other creditors have been engaged in an expensive fight over the $9-billion left over from the piecemeal sale of the company.

Talks to divide $9 billion raised from the sale of businesses of Nortel Networks, the telecoms equipment maker that went bankrupt in 2009, ended without agreement, and the mediator said on Thursday further discussions were no longer worthwhile, Reuters reported. The failure of nearly two weeks of talks in Toronto raises the prospect that disputes among various creditors and retirees around the world could lead to years of litigation over how to divide the cash.

A mediator overseeing creditor negotiations in Nortel Networks' bankruptcy said on Tuesday he is extending talks over how to distribute about $9 billion in cash at the fallen telecom, Reuters reported. Ontario Chief Justice Warren Winkler said in a statement the mediation, scheduled to end at noon on Tuesday, had been extended, but did not say for how long. A spokesman for the mediator declined to give detail on the length of the extension.

Video game company Atari SA said it filed for bankruptcy protection in Paris and New York on Monday after it failed to find a successor to main shareholder and sole lender BlueBay as it wrestles with tough market conditions, Reuters reported. The U.S. operations plan, in addition, to separate from their French parent to seek independent capital to grow in digital and mobile games, Atari Inc said in a statement. The U.S.