Spain's biggest consumer appliance company Fagor said on Wednesday it had started insolvency proceedings after failing to reach a deal on debt which it needed to keep going as sales fell, Reuters reported. Spanish bankruptcies have risen steadily this year, after a prolonged economic downturn that sapped consumer spending and as bank lending falls. Fagor, however, was part of the Mondragon group in the northern Basque Country region, a large cooperative seen as a flexible organisation that was riding out the crisis. Fagor is the fifth-largest electrical appliance company in Europe.

Germany's status as Europe’s industrial powerhouse could be damaging the single-currency bloc, the European Commission has said, as it launched a probe into whether the country’s large trade surplus was hindering Europe’s recovery, The Telegraph reported. Europe’s biggest economy was one of three countries singled out for an “in-depth review” by the EC’s Alert Mechanism Report on Wednesday. The Commission said Germany’s large current account surplus, which accounts for most of the eurozone’s positive balance, “may put pressure on the euro to appreciate vis-à-vis other currencies.

The Liepaja Court has a launched insolvency process against the financially-troubled metallurgical company Liepajas Metalurgs, reports LETA. The court has decided to halt the companies legal protection process and launch an insolvency process against it, The Baltic Times reported. Liepajas Metalurgs legal protection administrator, Haralds Velmers has been appointed the company's insolvency administrator. Velmers' insolvency petition was submitted to the court on Nov. 4.

Italian banks are still struggling with rising levels of bad loans, with smaller banks lagging in setting aside money to cover potential losses on them, even as the Bank of Italy urges a more aggressive cleanup on the financial institutions’ balance sheets ahead of a European health check next year, The Wall Street Journal reported. Third-quarter results of Italy’s banks reflect the pain they are still experiencing as Italy’s economy struggles to revive after two years of recession.

Germany's insolvent Hess said on Wednesday auditors found the street light maker's financial accounts for 2007 through 2012 overstated pretax profit by a total of nearly 45 million euros ($60.5 million), Reuters reported. Hess filed for insolvency in February, only months after making its stock market debut, saying a fraud investigation had scuppered its chances of raising urgently-needed funds. It said damages would now have paid to investors, who bought shares in the company based on false accounts.

Global investment banks could face almost $100 billion in civil settlements from investigations into interest-rate and foreign-exchange manipulations, analysts at Stifel Financial Corp.’s KBW unit said, Bloomberg reported. Probes of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, could cost $46 billion and currency trading inquiries could trigger another $26 billion, analysts led by Andrew Stimpson said today in a note. That’s in addition to settling claims over faulty mortgages with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which could be $24 billion, the analysts wrote.

Heads of state from 24 European countries gathered Tuesday to address an increasingly visible scar from the region's debt crisis: almost a quarter of young Europeans are unemployed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Leaders meeting in Paris aren't expected to come up with any new Europe-wide policies. Rather, they will review pledges already made and compare measures taken on national levels. In particular, they are looking at how to deliver on an EU pledge to propose employment or training to young people without a job, French officials said.

The National Asset Management Agency has put a London-based property company controlled by former Howard Holdings executives into receivership, according to court records in London, the Irish Times reported. The company, Wandle Holdings – which has 30 outstanding Anglo Irish Bank mortgages – is registered to an address at Hambalt Road, Lambeth in London, according to Companies House files. The administrative receiver to the company, Belfast-based John Hansen, was appointed on October 17th, though he will have to spend the next month or so investigating the company’s affairs.

Euro-area growth data this week may show the region’s nascent recovery slowing to a crawl, supporting Mario Draghi’s case for an interest-rate cut to help the economy get back to its feet. Gross domestic product in the region rose just 0.1 percent in the third quarter, according to the median forecast of 41 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. In the 3 1/2 hours before that report on Nov. 14, economists predict a series of data releases to show growth slowing in Germany and stalling in France, with Italy remaining mired in an unprecedented slump.

The Central Bank believes it is powerless to sanction the directors and managers of Newbridge Credit Union (NCU) for a litany of alleged rules breaches that were outlined by the regulator in court documents last week, the Irish Times reported. NCU got a €54 million taxpayer bailout over the weekend to facilitate a High Court-sanctioned takeover of the credit union by Permanent TSB. The regulator only gained the power to sanction credit union directors for regulatory breaches from August 1st this year, under the Credit Union and Co-operation with Overseas Regulators Act.