Banco Santander of Spain said on Wednesday that its profit declined by nearly half in the second quarter on restructuring charges and a contribution to a fund to help finance bank “bail-ins” in Europe, the International New York Times reported. For the three months ended June 30, the lender reported a profit of 1.28 billion euros, or about $1.4 billion. That compared with a profit of €2.54 billion in the second quarter of 2015. The second quarter included a gain of €227 million on the sale of its stake in Visa Europe.

The administrator of insolvent German online travel group Unister has hired Macquarie to find a buyer for the company operating popular sites such as flight booking platform fluege.de and package travel site ab-in-den-urlaub.de. "We see enormous demand from investors for the Unister group or parts of it," Lucas Floether told Reuters on Tuesday. Groups such as broadcaster ProSieben and private equity firm EQT have shown interest in Unister in two earlier sale attempts, the most recent of which collapsed in spring 2015 over valuation issues.

AIB will pay the State €1.76 billion tomorrow to redeem loan notes issued to it in July 2011 as part of its bailout from taxpayers, the Irish Times reported. This payment will involve the bank paying €1.6 billion to redeem the contingent capital notes (CoCos) at face value along with accrued interest of €160 million. The payment will coincide with the release of AIB’s financial results for the first six months of this year. Éamonn Hughes, a banking analyst with Irish stockbroker Goodbody, has forecast AIB will announce a net profit of €623 million.

Enterprise Insurance, a Gibraltar-based firm whose collapse last week has hit 14,000 Irish motor customers, has been described in court as “hopelessly insolvent”. It has as an asset shortfall of up to £18 million (€21.5 million), the Irish Times reported. The Gibraltar Financial Services Authority (GFSA) said this week that Frederick David John White of Grant Thornton has been appointed as provisional liquidator of the insurance company.

Italy was last night racing to secure a privately backed bailout of Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the most exposed of the country’s troubled lenders, including a plan to raise €5bn of fresh capital so as to avert nationalisation, according to bankers and European officials, the Financial Times reported.

Retail tycoon Philip Green's greed and disregard for corporate governance led to the demise of BHS and cost 11,000 jobs, a report by British lawmakers said, calling the collapse of the stores group "the unacceptable face of capitalism", Reuters reported. Billionaire Green, 64, owned BHS for 15 years before he sold the loss-making 180-store chain to Dominic Chappell, a serial bankrupt with no retail experience, for one pound last year. It went into administration in April, and all remaining 114 stores are due to close in the next four weeks.

Hospital equipment supplier Eurosurgical is likely to owe the Revenue Commissioners a substantial sum when the company’s final tax liability is calculated by its liquidator, the Irish Times reported. The High Court recently appointed George Maloney of RSM as liquidator to Dublin-based Eurosurgical, whose main creditor is Revenue, which had issued it with an assessment for €3 million. Mr Maloney is investigating Eurosurgical’s activities over a lengthy period leading up to the court’s decision to place it in liquidation.

Budget deficits for the 19 euro-area governments fell to an eight-year low in the first quarter as the pace of economic growth accelerated, Bloomberg News reported today. The euro area’s seasonally-adjusted budgetary shortfall fell to 1.6 percent of output compared with 2.2 percent in the same period a year ago, the European Union’s statistics agency said in a release published Friday. That is the narrowest shortfall since the first quarter of 2008.

New and increased government insolvency fees introduced yesterday will undermine the UK insolvency regime and cost creditors £8m per year, R3 has warned, according to Accountancy Age today. By threatening creditor returns, the government could undermine the UK’s World Bank insolvency ranking, the insolvency trade body said. Among other new fees, the government is introducing a fee of £6,000 in every compulsory liquidation or bankruptcy, even when the case is handled by a private sector insolvency practitioner rather than the government’s official receiver.

As worries that the European Central Bank will soon run out of sovereign debt to buy for its quantitative-easing program persist, Europe's over-leveraged governments are declining to lend a hand, Bloomberg News reported today. According to a study by JPMorgan Chase & Co., net issuance of new debt this year will fall well short of the ECB's appetite, which runs at a monthly clip of 80 billion euros ($88 billion). While that's just a drop in the ocean compared with the total "eligible universe," the data illustrate the speed with which the central bank is eating up the market.