Next year will be “a make or break” year for Greece’s future as a member of the eurozone, the country’s finance minister has said, warning Europe’s leaders that Athens still faces “the possible risk” of crashing out of the currency bloc.

Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Tuesday Italy would be forced to leave the euro zone unless the European Central Bank gets more powers to ensure lower borrowing costs, Reuters reported. Berlusconi, who announced this month he will again lead his People of Freedom party (PDL) in a national election expected in February, said on a talk-show on state broadcaster RAI that the ECB should become a lender of last resort for the currency bloc.

As times get tougher, discontent about Swiss tax breaks is mounting, Reuters reported in an analysis. Cash-strapped foreign governments have already chipped away at the secrecy that allows rich individuals to store tax-free funds in Swiss bank accounts. Now Europe's governments have turned the spotlight on the incentives Switzerland offers companies. Swiss official company tax rates of around 21 percent compare with 33 percent in France and 29 percent in Germany, according to a 2011 survey by accountants KPMG; often companies in Switzerland actually pay much less.

Maria Katri sent her son to live at a charitable home for poor boys after Greece's economy crashed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Now, as Greece slides deeper into depression, the widowed mother is so poor that her teenage daughter, who stills lives at home, is "jealous that her brother is having a better time than her in the institution," Ms. Katri says. The spread of economic hardship is fraying Greece's social fabric and straining its political cohesion as the country enters the harshest winter of its three-year-old debt crisis.

Britain will get the go-ahead to force banks to shield their routine retail operations from riskier investment banking activities when MPs announce the conclusions of an inquiry into banking reform on Friday, Reuters reported. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards will also recommend that the government can resort to a "nuclear option" of breaking up banks if they try to find ways around the new rules, commission sources said.

Photon Europe, the German publisher of several solar energy magazines and websites, has filed for insolvency, Recharge reported. A district court in the Western German city of Aachen has opened preliminary insolvency proceedings and appointed lawyer André Seckler as administrator, Photon says in a statement. Under German insolvency rules, he has three months to bring new investors on board to save the publisher, which has 140 employees. Seckler plans to keep it going in the meantime.

Greece is failing to collect the tax it is owed and is in danger of missing key targets that need to be met to reduce the government's staggering debt pile, the European Union warned on Monday, the Associated Press reported. An EU task force helping Greece overcome the financial crisis that brought it to the brink of bankruptcy said Athens still has trouble dealing with old, outstanding tax claims. With 2 months to go in 2012, it was still about a billion euros behind the EU target of recovering (EURO)2 billion ($2.6 billion).

If European leaders expect Enda Kenny to set aside his awkward disputes with the international creditors funding Dublin’s €67.5bn bailout during his six months at the helm of the EU’s rotating presidency, the Irish prime minister has a message: he is not going to go quiet, the Financial Times reported. Ireland next year could become the first of the eurozone’s five bailout countries to emerge from a rescue programme if all goes according to schedule.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi urged governments to build on "painful progress" they have made on narrowing budget deficits and overhauling their economies, despite the near-term damage these policies have inflicted on business activity and unemployment, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr.

A German maker of yachts and naval vessels agreed to buy insolvent shipyard Peene in a rare deal as the shipbuilding sector in Europe's biggest economy crumbles, Reuters reported. Bremen, Germany-based Luerssen Group is paying less than 20 million euros ($26.3 million) to buy former Communist East Germany's biggest naval shipbuilder, Peene's insolvency administrator Berthold Brinkmann said on Monday. The deal to buy Peene - which makes patrol boats for the coast guard and oil spill response vessels, among other - will make Luerssen Germany's biggest maker of naval surface vessels.