Intu has a complex loans structure. Some are secured against individual shopping centres while others are taken against the group as a whole.
Canadian pension fund CPPIB - which is a £250 million lender on the Trafford Centre - was said to be among several that did not budge on the talks.
Tonight was the deadline for lenders to agree to waive the covenants on a £600 million revolving credit agreement - a corporate equivalent of an overdraft.
Without the Trafford Centre being signed up, other lenders refused to agree to the waiver over the group.
Intu, led by Matthew Roberts, last month proposed standstill agreements would let it avoid breaching covenants on loans until December 2021.
He has been trying to tackle the debt pile since he inherited the troubled business after a tough 2018 that saw its larger rival Hammerson ditch a
£3.4 billion takeover offer and a consortium walk away from talks.
The outcome of the Intu debacle is still most likely to be a restructuring where creditors take over the equity of the business, possibly through a break up of the group if the complex web of debts can be disentangled.
