The owner of German department store chain Karstadt, Nicolas Berggruen, is interested in buying insolvent drugstore chain Schlecker, a person close to the U.S.-German investor said on Thursday, Reuters reported. A creditor meeting is scheduled for Friday to decide over Schlecker's future and possibly pick a buyer for what's left of the chain, which has closed 2,000 of its outlets. Daily paper Stuttgarter Nachrichten earlier said Berggruen entered the sales process two weeks ago, bidding between 100 million and 500 million euros ($126-$630 million).
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A group of Elpida Memory bondholders opposes Micron Technology's offer to buy the bankrupt Japanese chipmaker and has reached out to South Korea's SK hynix and U.S.-based GlobalFoundries to ready a potential alternative plan, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said, Reuters reported. SK hynix, which had dropped out during the second and final round of bidding for Elpida, is interested in the memory chipmaker's Taipei operations, while GlobalFoundries is interested in its Hiroshima operations, said the source, who asked not to be identified.
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Investors and financial analysts have their eyes on a bankruptcy case, pending in a Dallas courtroom, that they say could systematically shift how American firms do business with Mexican companies, KETK reported. The case also comes at a time when business interests from both sides of the Rio Grande are pushing to include Mexico in the current Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. Mexican glass company Vitro S.A.B filed for voluntary bankruptcy in December 2010, after defaulting on about $1.2 billion in bond debt held by foreign banks, including American interests.
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Private equity investor Cerberus has agreed to acquire roughly 22,000 German flats from insolvent Speymill Deutsche Immobilien (SDIC), Reuters reported. As part of the deal, Cerberus is restructuring 985 million euros ($1.25 billion) in SDIC's debt and will inject an undisclosed sum of fresh capital, the administrator and the private equity investor said in a joint statement on Wednesday.
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MF Global's European administrator KPMG is teaming up with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Lehman Brothers's administrator, to try to speed up the return of assets and cash to former clients of both failed brokers, Reuters reported. KPMG said on Tuesday it will work with PWC to establish whether unsecured funds can be "traced" and treated as if they were secured, following a ruling by Britain's Supreme Court.
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Micron Technology won the right to negotiate exclusively to buy Elpida Memory Inc after offering more than 200 billion yen ($2.5 billion) for the failed Japanese chipmaker, according to a source with direct knowledge of the deal that would more than double the U.S. company's global market share, Reuters reported. By acquiring Elpida, Micron would boost its market share to 25 percent, surpassing South Korea's SK Hynix and becoming the second-biggest maker of DRAM memory chips used in personal computers, according to U.S. technology research firm IHS iSuppli. Samsung Electronics is the largest.
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The National Asset Management Agency has intensified its legal efforts to seize international assets from bankrupt developer Ray Grehan by seeking to enter its judgment of €270 million last year from the Irish courts in the US, the Irish Times reported. Documents filed in the New York State Supreme Court show the State loans agency sought to enter the judgment for $351 million, the US dollar equivalent of the Irish court judgment, against the developer at the end of March.
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A trustee for failed brokerage MF Global Inc. has begun litigation in the U.K. that aimed at recovering $700 million in customer funds, according to a statement, Bloomberg reported. The trustee, James Giddens, said in April that he had been working since November to return the money and filed a claim with the administrators overseeing the company’s MF Global UK Ltd. unit. According to today’s statement, an application for direction, which begins the legal process, has been filed with the English court.
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A unit of Bahrain investment house Arcapita has filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States, the company said in a statement, Reuters reported. Falcon Gas Storage Company, a non-operating subsidiary of Arcapita, also intends to file a motion for joint administration with its parent company for the ongoing Chapter 11 restructuring, it said in the statement late on Monday. In March, Arcapita became the first Gulf entity to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U. S. after it was threatened with legal action if it did not repay a hedge fund in full.
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When Maclaren USA entered bankruptcy in December, its Chapter 7 filing made for a lot more questions about what the company was doing in bankruptcy than it provided answers—questions that have remained largely unanswered since, The Wall Street Journal Bankruptcy Beat blog reported. Why did sales drop so drastically in 2011, to $34,251 from over $20 million in 2010? Does Maclaren, the U.K.-based company that manufactures the strollers and other products, plan to continue selling in the U.S.?
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