About 35 multinationals, including brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, will be required to pay roughly €700 million ($765 million) in additional taxes in Belgium after European Union regulators ruled they had benefited from an illegal tax break, The Wall Street Journal reported. After an 11-month investigation, the European Commission, the bloc’s top antitrust regulator, concluded Monday that a Belgian tax-discount plan for multinationals amounted to “a very serious distortion of competition within the EU’s single market,” and ordered Belgium to recover the unpaid taxes.

The long-awaited trial of Spain’s Princess Cristina de Borbón and her husband on tax-fraud charges opened Monday, presenting a challenge for King Felipe VI as he tries to rebuild the monarchy’s prestige and assert its influence in the country’s unsettled politics, The Wall Street Journal reported. The king’s 50-year-old sister—the first sibling of a Spanish monarch to ever be tried, according to historians—faces up to eight years in jail if convicted on two counts of tax fraud.

A British referendum on whether to remain a member of the European Union is the single biggest “known unknown” hanging over the European economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. The vote now seems almost certain to take place this year. Prime Minister David Cameron hopes to achieve a deal at a summit in February on the changes to the relationship that he thinks are necessary to persuade Britons to back continued membership. EU officials say the parameters of the deal are already hammered out.

PGGM, one of the largest Dutch pension fund managers, will on Monday complete a €2.3bn trade to insure loans of Santander, the Spanish bank, in a deal that highlights the growing appeal of exotic financial instruments in a world of ultra-low interest rates, the Financial Times reported. The two parties are finalising a so-called synthetic securitisation deal, by which PGGM will sell credit insurance against potential losses on a portion of more than 6,000 Santander loans to small and medium enterprises.

It was an unpleasant late Christmas present for some of the world’s biggest investors. They woke up on December 30 to find that Portugal had announced plans to impose heavy losses on almost €2bn of senior bonds at Novo Banco, the bank created from the ruins of Banco Espírito Santo, the Financial Times reported in an analysis. This controversial move — prompting threats of lawsuits from some investors — was the latest in a series of rescue operations launched for struggling banks in Greece, Italy and Portugal in the last few weeks of 2015.

The Revenue Commissioners secured 27 criminal convictions for serious tax evasion and fraud in 2015, according to figures released Thursday, the Irish Times reported. Those prosecutions were on top of 2,063 summary convictions, or lesser charges, for the non-filling of tax returns and customs offences. Headline figures for the year show the service conducted more than 461,000 individual audits and compliance investigations which yielded €642.5 million.

Souring prospects in the world’s largest emerging markets are darkening an already cloudy outlook for the global economy, the World Bank said on Wednesday, as it cut growth forecasts for the third straight year, The Wall Street Journal reported. Deeper contractions than expected in Brazil and Russia and weaker output in most of the world’s biggest economies, including the U.S. and China, led the international development institution to downgrade its forecast for global growth in 2016 by 0.4 percentage point to 2.9%.

The Irish Mortgage Holders’ Organisation (IMHO) has proposed that banks, insolvency practitioners, the Government, regulators, and various other State agencies and debt advisory groups come together to try and formulate a big-ticket solution for long-term mortgage arrears.

Greece has a chequered history when it comes to repaying debt. Defaults span the 19th and 20th centuries, peaking with last year’s shock failure to pay back the International Monetary Fund on time, the Financial Times reported. But don’t imagine that the country’s debt market has been lying dormant in the midst of these troubles. Throughout the current crisis, Athens has been doing a brisk trade in short-term Treasury bills and on Tuesday the country held a successful auction that raised €1.63bn. The reasons investors rarely hear about these regular debt sales are twofold.

Medium-sized businesses were the most likely to be exposed to other firms' insolvencies in 2015, according to new research from insolvency professionals trade body R3, CRN reported. The research, which was based on R3's Business Distress Index which surveyed 500 UK businesses, found that 14 per cent of medium-sized firms (which employ 51 to 250 staff) were owed money in 2015 by an insolvent company. In total, R3 found that 113,000 UK businesses were owed money by companies going into insolvency procedures last year.