Leading Dutch bank ING reported on Wednesday a 22.3-percent slump in net profit for 2013, blamed special factors and said it would pursue its deep restructuring programme this year, The West Australian reported on an Agence France-Presse story. Amsterdam-based ING posted 3.2 billion euros ($4.3 billion) in net profit, down from 4.16 billion euros in 2012. Net profit for the fourth quarter of 2013 plunged by 63 percent to 539 million euros. However, this was much better than expected by analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires, who had put forward 351 million euros.

Justice Minister Alan Shatter has admitted that changes are needed to the new Personal Insolvency System while he also defended how it is operating, Independent.ie reported. He was speaking at a conference for Personal Insolvency Practitioners (Pips) on introducing new ways to make the debt deals work more smoothly. Mr Shatter said that some changes to the insolvency regime introduced last year were "inevitable", when he addressed the first conference of the new Insolvency Service of Ireland (ISI).

Iceland’s prime minister has criticised the UK and Dutch authorities for filing a IKr1,000bn (£5.6bn) lawsuit over the 2008 collapse of online lender Icesave, saying they should “forget” the affair as they were unlikely to win the case. Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, prime minister since May, told the Financial Times the Icesave lawsuit – in which the UK and Netherlands authorities are seeking a sum equivalent to nearly two-thirds of the island’s annual GDP – recalled his country’s previous legal battle against the two countries, which ended in court victory for Iceland last year.

At least a dozen large international investors are lining up to look at a large Spanish property-loan portfolio sale that will take the temperature of one of Europe's most distressed real-estate markets, The Wall Street Journal reported. Commerzbank AG recently began shopping around the portfolio—code named Project Octopus—that includes loans with a face value of €4.4 billion ($6 billion) that are backed by shopping centers, hotels and offices.

The European Union's antitrust chief, Joaquín Almunia, said Tuesday he was looking into unfair tax regimes by some European governments and whether these qualified as illegal state aid, The Wall Street Journal reported. His comments came amid a continuing row in Europe over how legal loopholes and low corporate tax in some countries allow large firms, such as Google Inc. and Apple Inc. to shrink their tax bill. Mr. Almunia said he had sent out a number of requests for information to those countries where there were "doubts" about the legal framework for taxation.

British and Dutch authorities have reignited the controversial dispute over the collapse of online lender Icesave at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 by filing a lawsuit for up to IKr1,000bn (£5.6bn) against Iceland’s bank guarantee fund, the Financial Times reported. Iceland’s guarantee scheme, TIF, said on Monday that the UK was seeking IKr452bn while the Netherlands wanted IKr104bn. Both countries are also seeking interest and costs in the five-year-old dispute.

Austria scrapped its plan to have healthy commercial lenders back a "bad bank" for toxic assets at nationalised Hypo Alpe Adria and will look now at creating its own wind-down vehicle, which would increase state debt, officials said, Reuters reported. Resistance from other banks and problems with setting up a bad bank in a way that would keep its debt off state books under European rules scuppered the plan, Finance Minister Michael Spindelegger said after a high-level meeting at the chancellery on Monday.

An English subsidiary of troubled building group, Siac, is seeking court protection from its creditors, according to reports, the Irish Times reported. West Sussex-based Graham Wood Structural, owned by the Irish building group, has filed notice of its intention to appoint administrators. Such a move means that it will get protection from any legal action by creditors seeking to recover their debts from the company. Graham Wood specialises in complex structural steel projects. The business lost £1.5 million in 2011 and £1.2 million in 2012.

The worsening political and economic circumstances in Ukraine has prompted the Fitch Ratings agency to downgrade Ukrainian debt from B to a pre–default level CCC. This is lower than Greece, and Fitch warns of future financial instability, RT.com reported. “Intensification of political and economic stress is such that default on government debt becomes probable,” Fitch said in an e-mail. On the brink of default, the Ukrainian economy has taken a further beating as protests drag on in the capital Kiev. Foreign debt is $140 billion, nearly 80 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Eurozone banks are facing a new capital black hole of as much as €50bn (£42bn), according to one of the UK’s most respected financial analysts, The Telegraph reported. Davide Serra, the chief executive of Algebris, who advises the Government on banking, said that this year’s stress tests by the European Banking Authority and the European Central Bank were likely to find fresh problems in the eurozone banks. He said that Germany had one of “the worst banking systems in the world” and that three or four regional Landesbanken were likely to be wound up.