Denis O’Brien’s Digicel Group has started an unprecedented cost-cutting plan and hired financial consultants McKinsey and Goetzpartners to help cut its massive debt burden as the mobile phone group grapples with declining earnings, the Irish Times reported. Digicel’s €6.2 billion debt is at “unsustainably high levels” at 6.2 times earnings at the group, Michael Chakardjian, an analyst with US credit research firm CreditSights, said at a conference in London this week.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA will launch a share sale Monday in a last-ditch attempt by the troubled Italian lender to avert being nationalized, The Wall Street Journal reported. The bank needs to raise about €5 billion ($5.23 billion) in fresh capital by the end of the year to stay afloat. If it fails to do so, the Italian government will step in and bail out the bank, according to a Treasury official. Monte dei Paschi said Sunday it would reserve 65% of the new shares being sold for institutional investors and that the offer will be open until 1300 GMT on Thursday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday signaled she wouldn’t intervene in the conflict pitching the Greek government against its creditors over its decision to give low-income pensioners a Christmas bonus, The Wall Street Journal reported. The spat comes amid concern in the eurozone that the country’s seven-year debt crisis could flare up again as Athens deviates from its strict fiscal obligations under a longstanding bailout deal. “This is not the place where decisions get made. This is in good hands with” international creditors and eurozone finance ministers, Ms.

A day after the Federal Reserve said it is lifting borrowing costs in the U.S., central banks elsewhere held fire, revealing a shared caution about the prospects for the global economy in 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Fed decision comes amid hopes for stronger growth stemming from President-elect Donald Trump ’s economic plans, but central bank officials from London to Seoul maintained a wait-and-see approach. In several cases, they contrasted those expectations of healthier growth with the political uncertainty stalking the U.S.

Germany prevented a new attempt to break the deadlock on a European Union's plan to boost financial stability in the banking sector by watering down a joint statement of a EU leaders' summit, EU officials said on Thursday, Reuters reported. The so-called banking union plan was launched in 2012 in the wake of the euro zone sovereign debt crisis and the 2007-08 global financial crisis that forced euro zone countries to provide almost 2 trillion euros in capital and guarantees to prop up their banks.

The number of people in work in the U.K. fell for the first time in more than a year in the three months through October, data showed Wednesday, signaling that the labor market may be softening and adding to signs of economic weakness emerging in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, The Wall Street Journal reported. Deteriorating economic conditions would spell trouble for the ruling Conservatives as they prepare to extricate the U.K. from the European Union, with formal divorce proceedings due to begin early next year.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA said the European Central Bank rejected its request to extend a capital increase into January over concerns that the Italian lender’s liquidity and capital ratios may deteriorate, posing a risk to its survival, Bloomberg reported. The ECB also said moving the deadline to Jan. 20 wouldn’t guarantee a more favorable market that might prompt banks to underwrite the share sale, Siena-based Monte Paschi bank said in a statement on Tuesday. The deadline for the 5 billion-euro ($5.3 billion) capital boost remains Dec. 31.

European bailout monitors have suspended planned debt-relief measures for Greece in response to a surprise move by Athens to spend an extra €600 million on poorer pensioners in breach of its international commitments, the Irish Times reported. European finance ministers this month agreed to short-term debt-relief measures that would cut Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio by up to 20 percentage points.

European lenders may have to borrow less than previously estimated to fulfil new regulatory requirements for loss-absorbing debt, according to a report published by the European Banking Authority on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The 186.1bn-276.2bn range, released as part of the EBA's final report on minimum requirement for own fund and eligible liabilities (MREL), is much narrower than the 130bn-790bn range the watchdog released in a interim report in July.

The State is to receive a €280 million payout from the IBRC liquidators in the next fortnight, as they make their first payout to the unsecured creditors of the former Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide, the Irish Times reported. The joint special liquidators of IBRC, Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson of KPMG announced on Tuesday that most unsecured creditors are to receive 25 per cent of what they are owed in an interim dividend.