The Spanish Supreme Court ordered Bankia on Wednesday to reimburse two small investors for misleading them during its 2011 initial public offering, the International New York Times reported. Under the ruling Bankia must pay one investor nearly 10,000 euros, or about $10,850, and the other nearly €21,000 euros, to cover their purchases of shares that eventually were nearly worthless. The ruling could be a boon to thousands of other investors who are suing the bank, accusing it of failing to fully disclose the loan problems that nearly caused the bank’s collapse in 2012.

The European Central Bank placed an “inappropriate” debt burden on Irish citizens in 2010 when it refused to force bond investors to share losses from troubled banks, a parliamentary committee report on the country’s banking collapse said on Wednesday. The report supports the view, widely held in Ireland, that the E.C.B. dictated policy to the government in a way that punished taxpayers while sparing investors who owned bonds issued by Irish banks. The central bank, which is based in Frankfurt, routinely denies that it meddles in politics or tells eurozone governments what to do.

Weak trading in the run-up to Christmas, when sales collapsed by a quarter compared to December 2014, spurred the decision yesterday by Hilco Capital to place Xtra-vision into provisional liquidation with the loss of 580 jobs, the Irish Times reported. The Xtra-vision brand is likely to survive via an online business, however, while its DVD vending machine business is also set to continue. Hilco’s HMV music store chain may also seek to buy back a small number of the 83 Xtra-vision stores and reopen them under separate ownership.

Italy and the EU have reached a deal allowing Italian banks to sell their large portfolios of non-performing loans to private investors with a government guarantee, in an effort to ease market pressure on the financial sector in the eurozone’s third-largest economy, the Financial Times reported. The agreement, which follows months of tortuous negotiations between Rome and Brussels, is intended to clear one of the most worrying clouds hanging over the European financial system after the end of the continent’s long recession.

Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, faced fresh questions last night over a tax deal with Google that allowed the company to pay just £130 million in back tax on 10 years of profits estimated at £7.2 billion, the Irish Times reported. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has demanded details of the settlement, asking Mr Osborne if he or his advisers were involved in arranging it.

Alexis Tsipras has fended off attacks from Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s newly elected opposition leader, by insisting that his Syriza government can rescue the country’s underfunded pension system without cutting benefits to retirees, the Financial Times reported. The prime minister and his rival went head-to-head on Tuesday night in a heated parliamentary debate, their first confrontation since Mr Mitsotakis, a pro-European reformer, was voted in to lead the centre-right New Democracy party this month. “There will be no reductions in main pensions,” a defiant Mr Tsipras said.

The European Court of Auditors has strongly criticised the European Commission’s handling of the Irish bailout, highlighting its failure to notice warning-signs in the run-up to the financial crisis, the Irish Times reported. In a hard-hitting report published this morning, the EU spending watchdog also pointed to the absence of key documentation relating to bailout decisions, noting that certain documents are still missing.

Bank of Portugal Governor Carlos Costa urged the EU on Monday to rapidly beef up the European bank resolution fund for winding up failed banks and resolve the "schizophrenia" between the responsibilities of European and national authorities, Reuters reported. Under the European Union's banking union project, all large euro zone banks are now under a single supervisor, the European Central Bank, and a common method of dealing with troubled banks has been put in place, including a joint fund, paid into by banks themselves, to cover the costs.

The European Court of Auditors has strongly criticised the European Commission’s handling of the Irish bailout, highlighting its failure to notice warning-signs in the run-up to the financial crisis, the Irish Times reported. In a hard-hitting report published this morning, the EU spending watchdog also pointed to the absence of key documentation relating to bailout decisions, noting that certain documents are still missing.

Russia’s economy shrank 3.7 per cent in 2015, the worst drop since the depths of the global financial crisis, as the country struggled with a drop in the price of its oil exports and international sanctions, the state statistics service said Monday, The Globe and Mail reported. The decline is the sharpest for Russia since 2009, when the world economy was suffering from the effects of a credit crunch and financial crisis. It matched the most recent prediction from the IMF, which forecasts another fall of 1 per cent in 2016 before a return to 1 per cent growth next year.