Fremont General Corp., the former subprime lending giant that regulators forced out of the mortgage business last year, said Friday that it probably would seek bankruptcy protection to hasten its liquidation of assets, the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday. Fremont General said that its board would wait to make the bankruptcy filing until regulators approved the sale of its retail business to commercial lender CapitalSource Inc. of Chevy Chase, Md. The retail operation includes 22 Fremont Investment & Loan offices in California and $5.6 billion in deposits. When the deal was announced last month, CapitalSource officials said that the branches would stay open with many of the same employees and no changes in interest rates or other terms of existing certificates of deposit or other accounts.

General Motors Corp., the biggest U.S. automaker, agreed to provide as much as $200 million to help American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc. end a two-month strike that has idled all or part of 33 GM plants, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The aid will be used for costs such as early retirements and buyouts of union workers at the supplier, GM said yesterday in a U.S. regulatory filing. The United Auto Workers walkout at American Axle, GM’s largest axle supplier, cut the automaker’s production by 230,000 vehicles through April and cost $800 million in the first quarter, GM said. The strike began Feb. 26.

Bondholders who are owed hundreds of millions of dollars by Tropicana Entertainment LLC asked a judge to put the casino operator under the control of a court-appointed administrator, saying the company’s leader steered it into financial distress, the Wall Street Journal reported today.  The bondholders asked Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Carey to put the company under the control of a chapter 11 trustee, saying that Tropicana Entertainment CEO William J. Yung shouldn’t be allowed “unfettered control over a significant chapter 11 proceeding involving a multi-jurisdictional, highly regulated gaming enterprise with over $2.5 billion of creditor claims.” The bondholders account for more than $700 million of Tropicana’s debt. The group includes Citigroup Global Markets, Harbinger Capital Partners, Highland Capital Management, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and a Merrill Lynch & Co. unit.