Growing Greek antagonism toward Germany is coming at a bad time for Athens as it seeks a better debt deal with its European partners, the International New York Times reported. A demand on Tuesday night by the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, for wartime reparations from Germany cast a pall over negotiations for more rescue money for Athens that began in Brussels on Wednesday. Germany, the biggest European lender to Greece, immediately issued a cool response to Mr. Tsipras’s comments, which were made in an address to the Greek Parliament.

Austria's Carinthia province is studying ways to avoid going insolvent under the weight of debt guarantees for defunct lender Hypo Alpe Adria several times its annual budget, the region's government said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Carinthia, which is in southern Austria, has an annual budget of 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) and would struggle to honour nearly 11 billion euros of backing for Hypo debt that creditors could demand. "Now all consequences...

Greece’s cash-strapped Syriza government is pressing the country’s social security funds to hand over hundreds of millions of euros immediately to ensure that pensions and civil servants’ salaries are paid this month, the Financial Times reported. The unprecedented transfer of bank deposits, which is opposed by pension and welfare funds, follows an unexpectedly sharp fall in tax revenues in January that has left the finance ministry scrambling to raise funds to make a €1.2bn loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund due by March 20.

Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has urged the European Commission to grant greater flexibility to Ireland in the application of budget rules to allow more “budgetary space” in October’s budget, the Irish Times reported. Minister Noonan raised the issue directly with German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble and the European Commission during two days of meetings in Brussels, at which EU finance ministers backed a proposal to grant France two extra years to meet its EU deficit targets.

Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin has become the latest senior Cabinet member to criticise mainstream banks over their conduct in personal insolvency cases. Mr Howlin warned banks that they must engage with customers in arrears instead of pushing towards bankruptcy, Independent.ie reported. "Not all banks are engaging as they should, and that's not good enough from the Government's perspective," he said. Mr Howlin's comments reflect a growing degree of frustration in government circles over the manner in which banks are engaging with the new insolvency regime.

Carinthia, the Austrian province on the hook for more than 10 billion euros ($10.7 billion) of Heta Asset Resolution AG’s debt, asked the federal government for credit and started preparations for potential insolvency, Bloomberg News reported. The southern province of 556,000 is asking for continued funding through the Austrian Treasury after a credit-rating cut by Moody’s Investors Service closed market access, the Carinthian government said in a statement on Tuesday.

Portugal's Novo Banco, the bank carved out of Banco Espirito Santo after a state rescue last year, expects to sharply reduce its loss this year and return to profits in 2016, emboldened by recovering deposits and improving liquidity. Novo Banco, which the state plans to sell this year to recover 4.9 billion euros in rescue loans injected in August, reported on Monday a 468-million-euro ($510 million) loss for August-December because of provisions and one-off charges.

Facing Western sanctions and low oil prices, Russian companies are lining up for subsidies from the government. But the demand for bailouts is quickly outstripping the supply of money, raising the prospect of an economic crisis here if the funds run out, the International Herald Tribune reported. With the economy flailing, the Russian government set up a corporate bailout program last year, tapping one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds. Almost immediately, companies started applying. The state-owned oil giant Rosneft has requested $21.3 billion.

Talks between Greece and the institutions overseeing its bailout will start delving for the first time into technical detail here this week, eurozone finance ministers decided Monday, a sign that most of the work needed to secure desperately needed funding for Athens has yet to be done, The Wall Street Journal reported. “The real talks haven’t really started yet,” Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who presides over meetings of eurozone finance minister said after the meeting.

Fresh from putting the squeeze on banks to behave themselves, regulators are scrutinising so-called shadow banks, alternative lenders such as investment funds doing big business out of countries like Ireland, the Irish Times reported. The third-biggest shadow banking market in the euro zone behind Luxembourg and the Netherlands, Ireland has amassed €2.9 trillion of assets, according to data from the European Central Bank, by way of business-friendly laws and tax exemptions.