Portugal won't seek a Greek-style debt restructuring deal, but will stay alert to opportunities to discuss better terms for the country where the principle of equal treatment applies, the country's top officials have said Tuesday, Dow Jones reported. "We don't want to be treated like Greece and have a solution identical to Greece's because we don't have a situation identical to the Greek's," Portugal Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho was quoted as saying by state-agency Lusa in a trip to Cape Verde.

Finance ministers of the European Union were deadlocked Tuesday over how to create a single banking supervisor for the euro zone, delaying a decision on a new system that is supposed to prevent future financial crises, the International Herald Tribune reported.

A week after settling on a debt-relief plan for Greece, euro-zone finance ministers met again Monday to discuss two other bailouts in the works, one for Cyprus and another for Spanish banks, and review progress on a key piece of the Greek plan, a debt buyback the Greek government launched Monday morning, The Wall Street Journal reported. The buyback is the most important part of last week's plan for cutting Greece's debt.

Greece's debt agency launched a multibillion-euro offer to retire roughly half the debt the country owes to private creditors, part of the latest effort to trim a towering debt burden, The Wall Street Journal reported. Bond markets reacted positively after Greece signaled it would pay a slight premium to buy back that debt, but the higher price and the limited size of the offer raise questions about whether the country will be able to cut its debt as much as its European and international creditors hope.

Much to the chagrin of the eurozone, Britain’s top industry prospers from serving a currency union the UK will not join. One senior EU official said “keeping an amicable distance is not an option”; financial services is the sector most entwined with the single currency and its nascent banking union, the Financial Times reported. The City’s golden ticket is the EU single market, a grand and unfinished scheme to eliminate barriers to the flow of capital, people and goods. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Square Mile blossomed as majority rule in the EU prised open continental markets.

Ireland's government must detail Wednesday tough spending cuts and tax increases in its budget for 2013 which could strain the public's grudging acceptance of the austerity imposed by an international bailout, as the country continues to wrestle with its worst-ever debt crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. Since the property market collapsed in 2008 bringing down the country's banking sector, Ireland has brought in €25 billion ($32 billion) in austerity measures, and each successive budget forces increasingly painful choices.

The U.K. tax authority needs to aggressively pursue multinational firms that avoid paying corporation tax and prosecute offending companies, a parliamentary committee said Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported. In a report on corporate tax avoidance, the Public Accounts Committee said Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, or HMRC, lacked determination to stop large international companies avoiding tax and was also too lenient.

Some of the loudest objections to EU banking union plans have come from Germany, and particularly from its savings banks, or Sparkassen, which believe they are central to the country’s tradition of strong regional industries, the Financial Times reported. They say home regulators better understand their characteristics and way of doing business.

The Spanish government said it won't make extra payments expected by more than five million retirees to adjust for this year's inflation, one of the toughest austerity steps yet in its struggle to slash a gaping budget deficit, The Wall Street Journal reported. The measure announced Friday means the government will withhold an estimated €3.86 billion ($5 billion) from older Spaniards, sending ripple effects throughout society. With more than one-quarter of the workforce unemployed, families rely increasingly on the retirement income of their elders to buttress household finances.

Greece will unveil details of a bond buy-back crucial to efforts by foreign lenders to trim the country's ballooning debt, hoping the terms will draw enough investors and unblock vital aid, Reuters reported. Since plans for the buy-back were announced on Tuesday, questions have swirled about whether it will tempt enough bondholders to cut Greek debt by a net 20 billion euros (16.2 billion pounds).