A group of Parmalat Finanziaria SpA investors are challenging Italy's new bankruptcy law to ensure bondholders get a say in the debt-repayment plans of Italy's largest dairy company.
The group of institutional investors, pension funds and private companies invested a combined 300 million euros (US$376 million) in Parmalat bonds. They filed a suit with a Rome administrative court to wrest influence from Industry Minister Antonio Marzano and Enrico Bondi, Parmalat's government-appointed bankruptcy administrator, in favor of a bankruptcy court.
Italy issued an emergency decree in December, changing the nation's bankruptcy laws to speed a restructuring of the maker of Kyr yogurts and Santal juices. Bondholders have said the bankruptcy procedure, which is overseen by the industry ministry, gives excessive influence to the government and creditor banks.
"This is a battle to make sure that internationally agreed treatment for all investors is recognized," said Umberto Mosetti, a professor of governance at the University of Siena and chief executive in Italy for Brussels-based investor advocacy group Deminor, in a telephone interview.
Deminor is advising the bondholder group on its court action, Mosetti said. The suit was filed on behalf of two French construction companies by Adolfo Di Majo of law firm DMP and a professor of civil law at Rome University, Mosetti said.
Lawyers for US creditors this month met with Marzano and other government officials to push for a US-style creditor committee to be included in the bankruptcy proceedings. Marzano is setting up a nine-member committee that will include the four foreign and four Italian banks with the most risk from Parmalat.
The ninth member will represent bondholders. More than 75,000 Italian investors own Parmalat bonds.
Marzano did not say whether creditors would have access to internal Parmalat documents and have a role in shaping any debt-repayment plan as they can in the US, or whether they would only be called on to advise Parmalat managers.
Bondholder representatives including Evan Flaschen, a partner at US law firm Bingham McCutchen, which is representing a group of 160 bondholders who own US$3.5 billion of Parmalat debt, said the committee didn't sufficiently represent bondholders.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
RSS