MF Global’s parent company has won court approval for its liquidation plan.
Judge Martin Glenn approved the plan on Friday in US bankruptcy court in Manhattan. MF Global Holdings Ltd collapsed in late 2011 after a calamitous bet on bonds issued by debt-burdened European countries.
MF Global had more than US$41 billion in assets. Its collapse was the eighth-largest corporate bankruptcy in US history and the biggest on Wall Street since the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers that set off the financial crisis.
Creditors to MF Global Holdings, the parent company, have not been paid for their losses, but the plan approved on Friday lays out how they will get their money. Former FBI director Louis Freeh is acting as their trustee to recover the money that the creditors are owed.
MF Global also owed money to customers, including farmers, ranchers and other business owners who used the company to hedge their risks against fluctuating crop prices. When the company collapsed, more than US$1 billion in customer money was discovered to be missing.
About 89 percent of the money owed to US customers has been distributed, and 18 percent for foreign customers, said James Giddens, the trustee in charge of recovering money for customers from the broker-dealer, MF Global Inc.
The approval comes a day after Freeh filed a report lambasting former MF Global chief executive Jon Corzine and other top managers, saying they had ignored the warnings of their chief risk officer.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained