Spain is preparing to start selling down its stake in Bankia SA, the bailed-out lender said yesterday, marking another milestone in the recovery from financial crisis of both the bank and the country, the Irish Times reported. Bankia, which returned to profit in 2013, said it had already held informal talks over the disposal of the government’s stake and its shares were attracting strong interest from foreign investors.

Mike Ashley, the billionaire owner of Newcastle United football club, flew into Dublin over the weekend as part of a last- ditch bid to prevent the proposed sale of Elverys Sports to its management and other investors, the Irish Times reported. Mr Ashley controls the listed UK retailer Sports Direct, which owns a 50 per cent stake in Heatons, the Irish department store chain. Heatons wants to buy Elverys, which is close to finalising a deal, backed by the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), to be bought out by a consortium assembled by the advisory firm Capnua.

Mayo-based Elverys Sports is set to be placed into receivership before being acquired by the company’s management team with the backing of investors brought to the deal by Dublin-based corporate finance house Capnua. This will secure the 650 jobs at the 55 Elverys outlets across the country but will result in the current owners, Mayo brothers John and James Staunton, no longer being involved in the business, the Irish Times reported.

Romania, using record-low interest rates to rebuild a housing market devastated by the economic crisis, is forcing homebuyers like Vlad Popescu to abandon cheap euro-denominated mortgages in the name of financial stability, Bloomberg News reported. In October, the government changed the terms of a four-year-old program for euro loans to only cover credit in the Romanian currency, the leu. In the following months, banks, led by Erste Group (EBS) Bank AG’s Banca Comerciala Romana SA and BRD-Groupe Societe Generale SA, accelerated leu mortgage lending.

A Hull-based legal firm has been wound up by the High Court in Manchester for abusing the UK insolvency regime, Insolvency News reported. An investigation by The Insolvency Service found Lovell Hill & Co LLP (LCH) had been offering bankruptcy relocation services to Germans seeking to take advantage of the shorter bankruptcy discharge periods in the UK; an act known as bankruptcy tourism. Acting as bankruptcy relocation advisers, LHC assisted German nationals who wished to wrongly claim their Centre of Main Interest (COMI) was in England and Wales for bankruptcy purposes.

The central banks of Austria and Hungary should seek a “workable and fair” solution to the problems Austrian banks are facing with Hungary, and shouldn’t become each others’ enemies, Austrian central bank Governor Ewald Nowotny said Friday, The Wall Street Journal Emerging Europe blog reported. “Close relationships are not necessarily always easy relationships. Our two central banks recently faced some difficult issues revolving around some foreign-owned banks,” Mr.

Germany needs to improve regulation and supervision of financial markets in order to protect investors, including those who have been affected by this month's insolvency of the wind park group Prokon, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has said. "It remains the goal of the German government to better regulate and supervise the grey zones of the financial market," Schaeuble was quoted as saying in an advance release from an interview being published in Friday's Handelsblatt newspaper.

MEPs on Tuesday (4 February) are expected to back new rules that would make it easier to liquidate or restructure European companies that fall on hard times, European Voice reported. Yet there is concern that MEPs will remove a key innovation from the European Commission's proposal that would allow certain bankruptcies to be dealt with outside the courts.

Strauss Innovation, a German chain of small department stores, said on Thursday it was seeking protection from creditors to try and rescue its business which has 96 shops across the country, Reuters reported. Strauss, owned by U.S. private equity firm Sun Capital Partners, has suffered from a mild winter hurting sales of cold weather clothing, industry sources said. Earlier this week, German department store Karstadt said its sales fell 3 percent in the key Christmas period, while rival Kaufhof said the mild winter weather had dampened sales of clothes.

Members of a European Parliament committee investigating the role of the troika and the impact of its policies in Greece on Thursday heralded the end of an “interim” institution, to be replaced by a “more democratically accountable and transparent” inspection process, and underlined the need for debt relief if Greece is to emerge from a spiral of austerity, ekathimerini.com reported.