An anti-bailout party that is leading Greek opinion polls ahead of this weekend's local government and European elections vowed Thursday to scrap international agreements that rescued the country's economy from bankruptcy at the cost of harsh austerity, the Associated Press reported. Three opinion polls also published Thursday found that support for the left-wing Syriza party was 2.5 percent to 3.2 percentage points ahead of the conservative New Democracy party, which leads Greece's coalition government.

The World Bank on Thursday approved $1.5 billion in funding for three Ukraine development projects as part of a larger international financing package, The Wall Street Journal reported. "We are stepping up our assistance to Ukraine because we want to help improve the lives of people in the country and to achieve economic recovery at a crucial time," World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said in a statement. In March, the bank said it planned to provide more than $3 billion in financing by the end of the year, including up to a $1 billion in budget support.

President Vladimir Putin is trying to transform Crimea into the Singapore of the Black Sea. That effort so far has cost Russia’s newest republic its entire banking system and all three of its McDonald’s, Bloomberg News reported. After Putin annexed Crimea in March, the government in Kiev banned all lenders operating under Ukrainian law from the region. Now almost every bank on the peninsula, from billionaire Igor Kolomoisky’s Privatbank, Ukraine’s largest, to Italy’s UniCredit SpA (UCG) has been shuttered.

Automotive industry supplier Cimos, one of the biggest companies in Slovenia, will undergo court-supervised debt restructuring after the major creditors decided against a debt-to-equity conversion by the Thursday deadline, the Slovenian news agency STA reported.

The clouds of the global financial crisis may have lifted, but six years later, the world economy is not creating nearly as many jobs as it was before 2008, a United Nations report on Wednesday concluded, nor is it expected to in the near term. That is a particularly worrisome fact at a time when more young people are entering the job market than ever before, the International New York Times reported. The economies of developed countries are likely to grow at 2 percent this year and 2.4 percent in 2015, a faster clip than in the two previous years, the report said.

Pre-tax losses at ACC Bank increased to €310 million last year, up from €213 million in 2012. The increase in losses reflected additional impairments on assets especially in respect of property related exposures, the Irish Times reported. In its final annual results as a licensed bank, the bank said total loans and advances to customers at year end amounted to €2.6 billion, in comparison to the €2.8 billion at the end of 2012. In October, ACC announced plans to withdraw from providing standard banking products, such as current accounts, to focus solely on debt recovery.

The prospect of negative interest rates is looking increasingly more likely in Europe amid speculation that the European Central Bank is looking at making the historic move in the hope of attracting more people to take out loans and prevent another credit crunch, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. According to German news magazine SPIEGEL, the ECB is expected to recommend that the bank cut its main refinancing rate from the current 0.25 per cent to a record low of 0.15 per cent when the bank's Governing Council meets in the first week of June.

European antitrust regulators on Tuesday accused JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and Crédit Agricole of having colluded to fix benchmark interest rates tied to the euro, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. Competition authorities at the European Commission said they had issued a so-called statement of objections – a formal step in antitrust investigations – to the three banks. The officials said their preliminary view was that the banks had colluded to influence the pricing of interest rate derivatives tied to the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, or Euribor.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said the government will consider scaling back its Help to Buy mortgage support scheme if the Bank of England believes it is inflating a housing bubble, as official data showed an annual house price rise of 17 per cent in London, the Financial Times reported. Mr Cameron told the BBC he agreed with Mark Carney, BoE governor, when he said last weekend that the sharp rise in house prices posed “the biggest risk” to the UK’s economic recovery.

Four Romanian judges are currently investigated for having asked for and received money in several insolvency cases, Romania-Insider.com reported. Prosecutors started the investigation against Ion Stanciu, Elena Rovenţa, Ciprian Sorin Viziru and Mircea Moldovan, all judges of the Bucharest court. They allegedly delayed some insolvency cases, or named certain judicial administrators to favor third parties, as well as disclosed information about the insolvency cases they handled.