Ireland is no longer seeking further debt relief from its European partners, Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has said, as he arrived in Brussels on Monday for a key eurogroup meeting on Greece. While Ireland had been targeting debt relief through direct recapitalisation of Bank of Ireland and AIB by the ESM fund, the euro zone’s bailout fund, Mr Noonan said that this mechanism was no longer being sought. “We’ve got what we wanted.

The International Monetary Fund Monday urged Germany to step up investment and accelerate structural reforms to boost its growth prospects and alleviate the negative effects of a rapidly aging society, The Wall Street Journal reported. “More progress on structural reforms would revitalize potential growth and enhance the authorities’ leadership at the European level in this area,” the Washington-based fund said in a statement.

A confidential document debated by eurozone finance ministers detailed for the first time what Greece’s creditors could do to ease the country’s debt load and how that burden would develop over the coming decades without new relief measures. The document, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, served as the basis of Monday’s emergency meeting, in which the ministers discussed for the first time the possibility of further debt relief for Greece.

CET Govora, the state-owned electricity and heat producer, has filed for insolvency, Business Review reported. The company was a supplier for several cities, including Ramnicu Valcea. CET Govora has debts of around EUR 200 million for the coal it got from another state-owned company, Complexul Energetic Oltenia. The company also has to recover money. For instance, it should receive RON 137 million from state-owned petrochemical plant Oltchim, which is at present in insolvency.

Greece returns to center stage on Monday when aid deliberations by its international creditors will signal whether the country faces a renewed period of political drift or wins some economic breathing space after six years of turbulence, Bloomberg News reported. The euro area and the International Monetary Fund will assess whether Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has made enough budget-tightening commitments to gain another aid disbursement. At issue is an IMF demand for fiscal “contingency measures” worth about 3.5 billion euros ($4 billion) in case Greece strays off budgetary course.

The euro zone is tying itself in knots over whether to limit banks' holdings of their own governments' bonds or to make them set aside more capital against home sovereign risk, Reuters reported in an analysis. Germany, the bloc's dominant power, has made such "risk reduction" measures, as it calls them, a prior condition before it will accept any further "risk sharing" in Europe's banking union through a common deposit insurance scheme.

Greek workers walked off the job on Friday, heeding a call by the country’s labor unions to join a three-day general strike to protest a new round of austerity measures including new pension cuts and tax increases, the International New York Times reported. The strike came as Greek lawmakers debated the new measures, worth 5.4 billion euros, or $6.2 billion, in budget savings, before a vote Sunday night and a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels the next day.

The number of debt judgments registered against businesses in the Four Courts during the first three months of the year, was up 24 per cent versus the same period in 2015, the Irish Times reported. New figures from the non-profit organisation Registry Trust show there were 295 judgments recorded, of which 158 were against incorporated businesses and 137 for unincorporated firms. The value of first quarter judgments totalled €25 million, up 118 per cent on the first quarter of 2015.

Lenders to struggling German oil and gas safety tools producer Bartec are set to appoint a financial restructuring adviser by the beginning of next week, according to two sources close to the situation. Lenders held a beauty parade on Wednesday to appoint a restructuring adviser as they push for a bigger equity injection from the company's private equity-owner Charterhouse. Three firms - Houlihan Lokey, Deloitte and Macquarie - are in contention, with a successful party likely to be appointed by Monday May 9, the sources said.

New World Resources Plc, which entered the Prague Stock Exchange eight years ago as the largest Czech equity offering ever, may become the country’s biggest corporate failure in at least a decade, Bloomberg News reported. The mining company, controlled by a group of investors including Ashmore Investment Management Ltd., said on Wednesday it will probably be “wound up or broken up in an orderly manner” as a result of an insolvency filing by its key asset, OKD AS.