Greece has a primary surplus for the first time in, well, a very long time. The budget, mind you, is still in deficit, after social security payments, interest on the debt, and payments to local government, Bloomberg reported. Nonetheless, this is a major achievement. Greece may still be borrowing to fund its debt payments, but at least it's not also borrowing to fund new spending. The government has slashed spending by 8 billion euros, or 20 percent, for the first seven months of the year while tax revenue has risen about 11 percent, to 30.8 billion euros.

The North’s Department of Enterprise is not often known for its perfect timing – so perhaps it is just a “lucky” coincidence that it is looking for a new director of its insolvency service at the same time as latest figures show a rapid rise in personal and corporate insolvencies in Northern Ireland, the Irish Times reported. According to UK official insolvency statistics for the second quarter of 2013, 894 people were declared insolvent in Northern Ireland.

German postproduction outfit CinePostproduction has filed for bankruptcy protection, the latest in a long line of VFX houses to go bust as the entire industry struggles to find a workable business model, The Hollywood Reporter reported. The Munich-based company, a subsidiary of the CineMedia group, is one of Germany's largest postproduction firms, with offices in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and Halle.

Greece has completed the sale of a controlling stake in the gaming company Opap to a group of Greek and eastern European investors, boosting the country’s chances of achieving this year’s €1.6bn target for privatisation revenue, the Financial Times reported. A contract signed on Monday in Athens provides for Emma Delta, an equity fund led by Jiri Smejc, the Czech billionaire, and Dimitris Melissanides, a Greek oil tycoon, to pay €650m for the state’s 33 per cent stake in Opap.

IVG Immobilien AG, the German property company seeking to restructure 3.2 billion euros ($4.3 billion) of debt, said creditors submitted a proposal that would wipe out most of its share capital. The shares fell as much as 26 percent, Bloomberg reported. Under the proposal, new shares would be issued in a debt-for-equity swap, the Bonn-based company said in a statement on Saturday evening. That would cut its share capital to 0.5 percent of the current value, IVG said.

Greece’s announcement Monday that it ran a primary surplus for the first seven months of this year – a key condition for further help from Athens’ euro zone partners — is set to intensify a debate that has been bubbling in the background for some time: How should the currency union deal with the still-massive debt loads of some of its members?

Drug store chain Dayli will close with the loss of 2,000 more jobs after no investor put up cash to prevent Austria's biggest retail collapse in two decades, its court-appointed administrator said on Monday, Reuters reported. "Investors claimed up to the end they wanted to cover the running losses but the money did not come," administrator Rudolf Mitterlehner said in a statement, adding creditors and a bankruptcy court had agreed to pull the plug. The decision closes the last 522 Dayli stores and a warehouse.

While the country’s economy is often held up as a model, German banks are among Europe’s most troubled. They required a bailout bigger than the one American banks received, and many are still struggling to recover, the International Herald Tribune reported. But there is remarkably little discussion about fundamentally changing the structure of the German banking system.

Ratings agency expects Irish banks to ramp up the rate of repossessions of buy-to-let properties for those in arrears with their mortgages and, as a result, doesn’t expect some of our biggest banks to return to profitability until 2015, the Irish Times reported. These were key observations from a largely positive commentary issued by S&P yesterday as a supplementary analysis to a research update on the outlook for Ireland that it published last month.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has signalled that the Royal Bank of Scotland will be in public hands for another five years, increasing the chances it will be broken up before it is re-privatised. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Cable revealed that he believed there was very little prospect of any sale taking place before the next election and that it is probable the state will retain its 81pc stake in RBS for the majority of the next Parliament as well.