Hungary has not made sufficient progress on the European Union's concerns about its respect for the rule of law for the EU to release frozen funds, the EU's budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn said on Thursday, Reuters reported. The EU has frozen billions of euros that Hungary could receive from the EU's budget over concerns about corruption and the country's lack of respect for the independence of the judiciary and non-governmental organisations.

Euro-zone countries haven’t broken the link between public finances and banks that dominated the region’s sovereign debt crisis, and investors could refocus on that vulnerability next year, S&P Global Ratings said, Bloomberg News reported. Despite the establishment of common supervision and resolution mechanisms aimed to eradicate such dangers, the entangled relationship that bred turmoil in several members of the single currency is “here to stay,” the company said in a report on Thursday.

A judge has dismissed a bankruptcy petition lodged by tax officials against former Liverpool and England footballer John Barnes, YahooFinance.com reported. Judge Mark Mullen was told by an official from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) at an Insolvency and Companies Court hearing on Wednesday that a tax debt had been paid and a settlement reached. But the judge was also told that Barnes, 60, was facing another claim, from the liquidators of a company he used to run.

Austrian tycoon Rene Benko’s Signa filed for insolvency after a last-ditch attempt to raise emergency funding failed, making the co-owner of New York’s Chrysler building one of the most prominent casualties of Europe’s property crisis, Bloomberg News reported. The filing is a bitter blow for the self-made mogul, who was known to boast that only the British royal family and the Catholic church could rival his array of exclusive properties.

More Dutch business owners are seeking help for financial problems despite the relatively low level of bankruptcy, Dutch News reported. The Dutch tax office has referred 1,465 companies this year to Over Rood, a volunteer-run organisation that helps companies in difficulty. In 2020, when the government bankrolled businesses that were unable to trade during lockdown, the number dropped to 607. The figure is relatively low despite the Netherlands being in recession, with the economy contracting in each of the first three quarters of 2023.

German inflation eased more than expected in November, falling to its lowest level since June 2021 due to a decline in energy prices, data from the federal statistics office showed on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The inflation rate fell to 2.3% in November. German consumer prices, harmonised to compare with other European Union countries, had risen by 3.0% year-on-year in October. A 4.5% year-on-year drop in energy prices had a particularly dampening effect on inflation in November, the statistics office said, a so-called base effect due to the very high cost of energy in November 2022.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz urged lawmakers on Tuesday to override Germany’s borrowing limits for a fourth consecutive year, allowing his government to take on billions of euros in fresh debt to modernize his country’s economy despite a budget crisis triggered by a constitutional court ruling, the New York Times reported. “It would be a grave, unforgivable mistake to neglect the modernization of our country in the face of all these acute challenges,” Mr. Scholz told Parliament, citing persistently high energy prices and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Spanish inflation unexpectedly eased, retreating for the first time since June thanks to drops in the costs of fuel and tourism, Bloomberg News reported. Consumer prices rose 3.2% from a year earlier in November, data Wednesday showed. That compares with 3.5% the previous month and defied the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists for an acceleration to 3.7%. A gauge of underlying pressures that excludes energy and fresh food fell to 4.5%, easing much more than anticipated.

The UK has paid £1.41 billion ($1.8 billion) to lenders that issued small business loans during the Covid-19 pandemic that are now suspected of being fraudulent, Bloomberg News reported. That’s a jump from the £640 million total refunded by the end of 2022, as banks that participated in the state-guaranteed emergency support programs three years ago work through a total of £77 billion in loans. The government said Tuesday that most businesses have repaid or are paying on schedule, though banks have now received £8.5 billion for loans that have defaulted.

The European Central Bank may need to take on a bigger role in supervising shadow banks as they are now bigger than conventional lenders and may be sitting on elevated risk, the outgoing head of the ECB's supervision arm told European newspapers, Reuters reported. Shadow banks, a collective term for non-bank financial firms such as insurers, hedge funds or investment funds, have grown to 51 trillion euros ($56.13 trillion) in assets, but face laxer regulation than conventional lenders, which poses a growing threat to overall financial stability.