Argentina Talks Collapse

Argentina failed to revive negotiations with creditors holding about $100 billion of defaulted bonds as none of the major bondholder groups showed up at a meeting for talks about a proposal to swap old bonds for new securities. "There is no point in meeting to listen to their done deal," said Horacio Vazquez, treasurer of the Argentina Bondholders' Association, which represents 7,000 retail bondholders in Argentina. Argentina last week unveiled a plan that it said would compensate investors 25 cents per $1 of defaulted debt, as measured by discounted present value of the bond payments.

Trading Halted Over Missing Filings

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading in 26 shell companies for 10 days because they failed to file financial disclosure reports, the first time it suspended trading because a company failed to file required documents, the agency said. The action is part of an effort to prevent schemes in which investors try to inflate the price of a stock to sell it at a profit. The SEC said it is moving to revoke the companies' registrations.

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New York state Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer said he tried and failed to reach an agreement with Dick Grasso to recover some of the former New York Stock Exchange chairman's $140 million in pay, and now plans to take the case to trial. "It's absolutely inconceivable that I'm settling it now," Spitzer said at a conference in New York sponsored by Money magazine. Grasso, who wrote on May 26 that Spitzer's lawsuit "smacks of politics," said through his spokesman, Eric Starkman, that Spitzer's comments today are "a political rallying cry."

Regal Entertainment Group, the world's largest movie theater company, was sued by Mel Gibson's Icon Distribution over $40 million in box office receipts from "The Passion of the Christ." Regal agreed to pay 55 percent, or "studio terms," of its aggregate receipts from the film and has instead offered Icon only 34 percent of its proceeds from the film, according to the suit.

The former Rite Aid executive whose secret tapes helped prosecutors convict several colleagues in the billion-dollar-plus accounting scandal at the drugstore company was sentenced to two years' probation and 100 hours of community service and was fined $2,500. Timothy J. Noonan, who pleaded guilty to withholding information from the company's internal investigators, is the only one of five Rite Aid defendants sentenced so far not to receive a prison term.

A former Adelphia Communications executive on trial with the cable company's founder and two sons told a jury that he believed investing in golf courses was fair game for a company trying to impress clients. Michael C. Mulcahey, the company's former assistant treasurer, defended the same practices that prosecutors earlier had highlighted as examples of illegal excesses carried out by a family-operated company run amok. Mulcahey also defended monthly loans by the company of up to $1 million to company founder John J. Rigas.

Ernst & Young is the target of a federal inquiry into possible conflicts of interest involving payments the accounting firm made to a consultant. The consultant, Mark C. Thompson, was paid about $377,000 to create marketing material for Ernst & Young while serving on the boards of three of the accounting firm's clients, said Ernst & Young spokesman Charles Perkins.

FedEx Express received a contract to handle guaranteed deliveries to about 190 countries for the U.S. Postal Service, a deal that was previously held by DHL Worldwide Express. Financial terms weren't disclosed when the contract, which starts July 1, was announced.

HealthSouth, accused by U.S. regulators of a $2.7 billion accounting fraud, fended off a possible bankruptcy by persuading bondholders to restructure terms of $1.9 billion in debt under an agreement that will cost it $73 million to $80 million, said the Birmingham-based company. Bondholders have until June 23 to ratify the consent agreement, the company said.

Airbus will provide 30 more A320 jets, valued at $1.8 billion, to discount carrier JetBlue, widening its lead over Boeing as the world's top maker of airliners. JetBlue says it plans to take delivery of as many as 17 Airbus jets per year until 2012.