ING Group completed the sale of its Asian private banking unit to Singapore’s OCBC, the biggest deal in the private banking sector since the financial crisis. Netherlands-based ING said the sale is in line with its strategy to focus on fewer franchises and reduces the group’s complexity.  Read the Reuters story here.

Spain’s Ferrovial has no plans to tap equity markets in 2010, though its British airport operator BAA will continue to raise cash through bond issuance, chairman Rafael del Pino told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.

And in other news:

Bank of New York Mellon Corp is in late-stage talks to buy a PNC Financial Services Group business for about $2.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Pittsburgh-based PNC has been shopping its PNC Global Investment Servicing business and a deal could come as soon as next week, says the report.

JP Morgan is launching a worldwide business aimed at selling loans and commercial banking services to multinational corporations, the Financial Times said. The new business will sell products ranging from loans to commodities and focus first on fast growing economies like China and India.

Struggling retailers are staying as far away from bankruptcy courts as possible this year after being traumatized by a slew of liquidations in 2008 and having a general feeling that the bankruptcy code is unfair to them.

While the most recent holiday shopping season was better than 2008, some retailers whose holiday was only so-so, could benefit from being able to reduce their size or get out of onerous leases in bankruptcy.

But retailers are increasingly viewing filing for bankruptcy as the beginning of the end, and are increasingly wary that they could turn out to be the next Circuit City.

The Turnaround Management Association on Thursday reunited several of the major players in the Circuit City case, who said the bankruptcy code’s new bias toward speed was one of the main reasons any attempt to save a portion of Circuit City failed.

“Quick bankruptcies are a good thing, but they’re not necessarily good for a retailer,” said Richard Pachulski, an attorney at Pachulski Stang Ziehl & Jones who represented unsecured creditors in the case.

The experts on the panel said a 2005 rule that requires bankrupt companies to decide to assume or reject real estate leases within 210 days of filing for bankruptcy makes reorganizing extremely difficult for retailers who often concentrate a large portion of their annual sales around the holiday period.

Retailers now have to “make decisions about leases long before they have the information about which leases to keep,” Edward Morrison, a Columbia Law School professor, said on the panel.

“You’re shooting in the dark,” Pachulski said .

For example, a retailer who files for bankruptcy in February would have to make all its decisions about which stores to close, without ever being able to go through another holiday season, when retailers typically do about 25 percent of their annual sales.

So what’s a retailer to do? Apparently wait it out and hope. Turnaround experts at the conference were saying retailers shouldn’t file for bankruptcy or be forced into bankruptcy unless they are sure what stores they want to close.

But on the panel, Morrison warned about the perils of “hope,” citing Circuit City’s dashed hopes that it would get a $75 million tax refund prior to filing for bankruptcy.

“A wise man once said hope is not a strategy,” Morrison said.