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.

Mystery bond buyers are raising eyebrows in European markets by lending millions of euros to governments for the next 100 years, the Financial Times reported. First to bite was Ireland, a country hard hit by the eurozone debt crisis and forced into an international bailout just six years ago. At the end of March, the Irish debt management agency announced it had privately raised €100m through a 100-year bond at a yield of 2.35 per cent, a rate lower than US 30-year debt. It was, said the agency, “a big vote of confidence in Ireland as a sovereign issuer”.

The main business of Czech coal miner New World Resources (NWR) filed for insolvency on Tuesday after failing to secure government aid, but could still agree a reorganisation plan to stay afloat, Reuters reported. The business, OKD, which owns the country's only hard coal mines, is the latest miner worldwide to seek creditor protection amid slumping prices. Loss-making OKD said in its insolvency filing that it owed 17 billion crowns (629.01 million euros) and held assets worth less than 7 billion crowns.

The British government on Tuesday ordered an investigation into the circumstances surrounding department store retailer BHS's collapse into administration last week, Reuters reported. Business Secretary Sajid Javid has instructed the Insolvency Service to fast-track its inquiry, which will also specifically consider the extent to which the conduct of the directors of BHS led to its insolvency.

Nearly a decade after the first flush of the financial crisis, the news flowing from Europe’s banks has been a nightmarish reprise of the kind of scandal and depressed profitability that now passes for normality. Some of the banks’ results beat “expectations” but when analysts’ forecasts have been carefully massaged down ahead of time, that hardly counts as success, the Financial Times reported. There have been glimpses of good news. Across most of Europe’s banks, costs are being cut more sharply than forecast.

Italian banks' subordinated debt took a hit on Tuesday as the after-effects of the failed Vicenza IPO started to filter through to the debt markets. A 200m 9.5% 2025 Tier 2 bullet from Banca Popolare di Vicenza has lost over three points since the end of last week and was quoted at a 92.56 cash price on Tuesday, according to Eikon. A 200m 9.5% Tier 2 2025 deal callable in 2020 from Veneto Banca has not fared much better, dropping from 92.8 at the open to 90.1 by lunchtime.

New World Resources' (NWR) loss-making coal mining division OKD will have to file for insolvency unless the government can agree a deal with its owners to take the company over at a lower price, Czech Industry Minister Jan Mladek said on Monday. NWR has already said the coal mining group will run out of money by the middle of May and will need to file for insolvency before that unless the government and creditors agree a deal soon. The coal miner, which employs around 13,000 people, has been hit by low prices and weak demand.

Mario Draghi has hit back against German criticism of the European Central Bank’s interest rate policy, saying low borrowing costs were symptomatic of a glut in global savings for which Germany was partly to blame, the Irish Times reported. The ECB president’s argument on Monday is a new line of defence against strong objections from German politicians, bankers and the media over the ECB’s decision to lower its benchmark main refinancing rate to zero. The ECB also has a deposit rate of minus 0.4 per cent, which works as a tax on lenders’ reserves held at the central bank.

Paymill, a one-stop solution which enables merchants to easily accept credit and debit cards, announced it made the decision to go for a preliminary insolvency in self-administration. With this decision, the German online payment provider hopes to bring the merger and acquisition negotiations to a successful result, Ecommerce News reported. There were already some rumors about Paymill filing for bankruptcy in the German media, but the online payment provider chose to share the news itself on the company’s blog.

The world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund is launching a crackdown on executive pay, targeting high salaries at companies around the globe in an attempt to exert its influence in a debate that has been gathering pace in recent months. Norway’s $870bn oil fund, which has previously refused to interfere in how much chief executives are paid, has decided that its position is untenable and is looking for a first company to target publicly on pay in the coming months, the Financial Times reported.