Austria will not let nationalised lender Hypo Alpe Adria go bust, Austrian National Bank Governor Ewald Nowotny said on Friday after a newspaper reported that a top government adviser favoured the idea, Reuters reported. "Austria reached a clear agreement with the European Commission this summer on restructuring Hypo Alpe Adria. We are now proceeding according to this concept. A Hypo bankruptcy is out of the question," Nowotny told the Austria Press Agency.

A road construction company, believed to be controlled by billionaire Vassil Bozhkov, announced it has filed for insolvency, Novinite.com reported. Holding Roads, the leading company in the tie-in, which won the tender for the construction of the longest section in Trakiya highway, linking the city of Yambol and the town of Karnobat, made the statement exactly two years after a spate of reports about its poor financial state flooded local media. The company posted a loss of BGN 6.12 M at the end of September 2011 and said its debts to banks and non-banking financial institutions increase.

Loss-making Alitalia has yet to raise all of the 300 million euros ($407 million) it was seeking in an emergency cash call, piling more pressure on the Italian airline and find a strategic investor to keep it flying, Reuters reported. Alitalia said on Thursday it had received 173 million euros by a deadline for existing shareholders to subscribe to its cash call via pledges and bank guarantees and expected to raise the rest from the state-owned postal service and other investors.

Bruised by the traumatic experience of Greece’s two bailouts, staff of the International Monetary Fund floated a proposal in April that would insist that distressed countries’ excessive debts be restructured before a bailout is granted. In a riposte published this week, a group of leading authorities on sovereign debt claims the idea goes too far, The Wall Street Journal reported. Instead, the experts—including lawyer Lee Buchheit, academic Mitu Gulati and former IMF deputy managing director Anne Krueger– advocate gentler treatment of private-sector creditors.

Some German insurers may fail in the wake of tough new European capital rules for the industry due to come into force in 2016, Germany's top insurance supervisor said, Reuters reported. "I'm not sure that all insurers will make it," Felix Hufeld, head of insurance at German watchdog Bafin, told a conference at the University of Frankfurt late on Tuesday.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA is seeking to return to profit after cutting costs and raising capital as part of the bailed-out Italian bank’s restructuring plan, Bloomberg reported. Monte Paschi targets net income of 200 million euros ($272 million) in 2015 and 900 million euros in 2017 after shedding 8,000 staff, selling 3 billion euros of new shares and shrinking its balance sheet by 25 percent, Italy’s third-biggest bank said in a statement yesterday. The lender’s plan, which received European Union approval Nov. 27, will allow it to repay 4.1 billion euros of state aid by 2017.

Fifty-eight of the 73 stores of insolvent German home improvement retailer Max Bahr are likely to be saved in a deal with supermarket chain Globus, two people familiar with the negotiations said on Tuesday. Max Bahr was due to start clearance sales on Wednesday, like those currently being held at stores of its parent company Praktiker, which has also filed for insolvency. But German group Globus has reached a last-minute agreement with Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns 66 of Max Bahr's stores, and contracts should be signed on Wednesday, one of the sources said.

Pensioners in developed economies are no longer being spared the worst effects of the financial crisis as fiscal austerity programmes aimed at curtailing spending on the elderly start to kick in, the OECD has warned, the Financial Times reported. Spending on pensions, which accounts for nearly a fifth of government outlays on average across the 34-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, is being limited through a variety of benefit changes including raising state retirement ages and freezing – or even cutting – payouts.

Indebted Finnish miner Talvivaara said on Tuesday its biggest creditor, zinc producer Nyrstar, has withdrawn support for its court application for a corporate restructuring, prompting the court to ask for more information, Reuters reported. Talvivaara, hit by falling nickel prices and chronic production problems, earlier this month halted operations and petitioned the Espoo District Court near Helsinki for a court-supervised reorganisation and warned it might face bankruptcy if the process failed.

U.K. Treasury chief George Osborne on Tuesday gave in to parliamentary demands to enhance the Bank of England's powers to set the amount of capital that banks must hold, but he warned it against using the so-called leverage ratio to impose unnecessary burdens that might restrict economic recovery, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr.