The Dutch financial services firm ING Group said on Wednesday that it would make a final repayment six months earlier than expected of the billions of euros in state aid it received during the financial crisis, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. ING, based in Amsterdam, said it planned to make its final payment of 1.03 billion euros, or about $1.29 billion, to the Dutch government on Friday. The lender had expected to pay the final installment in May 2015.

Leyne, Strauss-Kahn & Partners, the financial-services firm that was headed by former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and late financier Thierry Leyne, said on Wednesday that it is insolvent, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Luxembourg-based firm said in a short statement that, after the “tragic death” of Mr.

The list of multinational businesses accused of using European jurisdictions to cut their tax bills grew much longer on Wednesday when a group of investigative reporters published findings accusing more than 300 companies, including PepsiCo, Ikea and FedEx, of benefiting from preferential deals with the government of Luxembourg. The findings, by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, are based on a trove of leaked documents that included 548 so-called comfort letters that the group said Luxembourg had provided to corporations seeking favorable tax treatment.

International lenders have attacked Portugal for allowing the pace of reform to slacken since the country exited a three-year bailout programme, warning that some of the progress made at the cost of tough austerity measures could be reversed, the Financial Times reported. After their first mission to Portugal since its €78bn rescue programme ended in May, the “troika” of the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank on Wednesday said that greater reform efforts were needed to “underpin a still nascent economic recovery”.

Alpha Bank AS, Greece’s fourth largest lender, reported a steep third-quarter net loss Tuesday due to a mammoth voluntary retirement scheme, but otherwise showed an improvement in core operating trends and declining provisions for bad loans, The Wall Street Journal reported. For the three months to September, the bank said net losses totaled €156.9 million ($197 million)—better than market expectations—compared with a net profit of €361.4 million in the second quarter. A year ago, the bank reported a €255.9 million loss.

Companies have been going bust in the European Union at the rate of about 200,000 a year for most of the period since the financial crisis. Now that figure is beginning to decline, especially in parts of Southern Europe, The Economist reported. However, legal systems across the continent are making insolvencies more difficult to resolve quickly. But handily, the surge in bankruptcies during the worst years—as well as growing concern that outmoded rules are slowing the flow of capital to firms that could use it better—has initiated a wave of reforms around much of Europe.

The verdict is in on the International Monetary Fund’s call for government austerity in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis: bad idea, Bloomberg News reported. Where the fund went awry was in its 2010 shift away from recommending government stimulus to calling for budget cuts in the biggest advanced economies, according to a report released today by the IMF’s internal watchdog, the Independent Evaluation Office. That turn was inappropriate given the global recovery’s modest pace, the report said.

Bank of Ireland repossessed 621 owner-occupied or buy-to-let properties in the first half of this year, according to documents submitted to the Oireachtas finance committee in advance of the appearance by its chief executive Richie Boucher today, the Irish Times reported. Bank of Ireland has told the committee that 322 judgments were enforced against owner-occupiers, with 299 on buy-to-let investments. This means that the property was either in the bank’s possession or had been sold. In the first six months of this year, the bank had sold 80 properties that it had repossessed.

Eurozone leaders are weighing a plan to allow Greece to exit its four-year-old bailout at the end of the year by converting nearly €11bn of unused rescue funds into a backstop for Athens for when it raises cash from the markets on its own, the Financial Times reported. The plan, which will be discussed at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels on Thursday, would allow Antonis Samaras, Greek prime minister, to declare an end to the quarterly reviews by the hated “troika” of bailout monitors ahead of parliamentary elections, which could come as early as March.

Finnair Group reported a net profit of €16.6 million for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, down 38.3% from €27 million for the same period last year, Air Transport World reported. Operating profit was down 40.7% for the period, to €23.6 million from €39.8 million in the year-ago period. The airline group attributed the disappointing performance to the strengthening of the euro against several revenue currencies, the ongoing weakness of the Finnish and eurozone economies, tumbling unit revenues, and declining cargo revenues.