Sirkka Hamalainen, Finland’s first female central bank governor and a founding member of the European Central Bank, is returning to the region’s highest policy circles to help reshape its banks, Bloomberg News reported. “The only thing which is still missing in the banking union structure is the question of how to deal with too-big-to-fail banks,” Hamalainen said in an interview in Helsinki on April 11, three weeks before taking up her role as a member of the ECB’s new Supervisory Board.

Punch Taverns, Britain’s second biggest pubs group, has brought in an independent corporate restructuring expert to aid long-running discussions over its £2.3bn debt mountain, The Telegraph reported. Dean Merritt, from Talbot Hughes McKillop, is representing the companies that issued Punch’s debt, amid hopes a deal that is agreeable to all lenders and shareholders can be thrashed out by the beginning of next month.

Strauss Innovation, a German chain of small department stores, has attracted several potential buyers after it sought court protection from creditors in January to try to rescue its business, a German magazine said on Saturday, quoting its administrator, Reuters reported. Andreas Ringstmeier told weekly WirtschaftsWoche some of the interested parties were financial investors with experience in retail industry and had already submitted their indicative bids.

The Bank of England will have to rethink how it acts as lender of last resort after Britain failed to revise incoming EU rules that could scupper its scheme to give covert support to banks in difficulty, the Financial Times reported. Three EU countries rebuffed Britain’s last-minute pleas to “clarify” the fine print of an agreed rule book on bank crises so that central banks are allowed secretly to prop up lenders facing short-term funding difficulties.

Get ready for the biggest vote in the Co-op's 170-year history. Amid the squabbles, resignations and rows over pay, the poll on 17 May on boardroom reform will take place with the organisation's finances looking ghastly, The Guardian reported in a commentary. This is where attention will soon be concentrated once the Co-op Group publishes its accounts for 2013. It is also why the group's lenders, who have remained silent so far, could yet influence the struggle for power. Group debts were £1.2bn at the half-year stage.

A significant number of company failures are expected to materialise this year, despite new figures showing a continued steady decline in the level of corporate insolvencies during the first quarter of the year, the Irish Examiner reported. According to corporate recovery and insolvency experts, Kavanagh Fennell, the first three months of this year saw a near 13% year-on-year reduction in insolvencies, with 303 failures being recorded compared to 347 for the same period last year.

Rusal has received approval from its lenders for “forbearance”, in a move that will stave off default as it seeks to hammer out a restructuring of its $10bn net debt pile, the Financial Times reported. The world’s largest aluminium producer has been negotiating with creditors since last year to change the terms of its debts, as its profitability is weighed down by aluminium prices at four-year lows. However, it failed to receive the necessary unanimous support from a group of international banks before a repayment that was due this week.

Russian capital outflows in the first quarter were the largest since the last three months of 2008 when the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. triggered the biggest credit squeeze since the Great Depression. Net outflows totaled $50.6 billion, more than double the $17.8 billion that left in the previous quarter, the central bank in Moscow said in a statement on its website today. In the final quarter of 2008, capital outflows were $132.1 billion. Outflows for the whole of last year reached $59.6 billion.

Europe’s corporate executives would have to seek shareholder approval for their salaries and justify the pay gap between management and their workers under Brussels’ latest remuneration clampdown. Michel Barnier, the EU commissioner who saw through the banker bonus cap, unveiled a fresh round of measures designed to strengthen corporate governance and give investors more influence.

European banks are bracing for additional capital charges as a result of stricter capital rules proposed by the European Banking Authority, Deutsche Bank AG's co-Chief Executive Jürgen Fitschen said Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Regulators have long required banks to set aside capital as a cushion for bad times. Since the financial crisis of 2008, they have raised these requirements and set tighter standards for what can be considered "safe" capital.