Eurozone governments could be forced to accept losses on their rescue loans to Greece after Monday’s late-night deal to overhaul its bailout failed to agree how to reach new debt targets for the struggling country, according to documents seen by the Financial Times. After three gatherings in two weeks, eurozone finance ministers agreed to release a long-delayed €34.4bn aid payment to Athens. But the series of measures agreed, which could relieve Greece of billions of euros in debt by the end of the decade, do not go far enough.

European Union countries and the European Parliament agreed today to introduce limited controls on credit ratings agencies after their judgment was called into question in the debt crisis, the Irish Times reported. Michel Barnier, the European commissioner in charge of regulation who helped broker a deal on the new law, said it aimed to reduce the over-reliance on ratings and establish a civil liability regime. The new rules should make it easier to sue the agencies if they are judged to have made errors when, for example, ranking the creditworthiness of debt.

Greece's international creditors reached a deal to end an impasse over the country's rescue program and unlock long-delayed loan payments, though the plan left officials with a host of challenges to cut the government's debt burden, The Wall Street Journal reported. Finance ministers from the 17-country euro zone and the International Monetary Fund struck a deal in Brussels to cut Greece's debt to a level below 124% of gross domestic product by 2020, officials said.

Though the crisis in Europe has been pushed aside in recent months, the new year is likely to bring new concerns that a slew of nations are in line for debt defaults, The Christian Science Monitor reported. Citigroup released a fresh analysis Monday in which the firm estimates that at least five nations along the periphery of the euro zone will need to restructure their onerous debt burdens.

UBS AG was fined 29.7 million pounds ($47.6 million) by the U.K. and told by the Swiss that it may have to increase capital levels for operational risks as regulators levied penalties after Kweku Adoboli’s $2.3 billion trading loss, Bloomberg News reported today. The Financial Services Authority in the U.K. issued the fine today, saying that the loss revealed serious weaknesses in management systems and internal controls. Finma, the Swiss regulator, said that it instructed UBS to appoint an independent third party to report on the progress and completion of a program to fix these failings.

Former subordinated bondholders in Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks are seeking recompense for being forced to take just one cent for every EUR1,000 of such bonds they held, Reuters reported today. This follows hedge fund Assenagon's successful suit in the English High Court against Anglo Irish Bank in July for executing similar coercive actions.

European leaders failed to reach agreement today on the European Union's budget, with wealthier countries saying that there was not enough restraint in the proposed seven-year spending plan, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Talks collapsed on the second day of the 27-nation summit. Belgium's foreign minister, Didier Reynders, tweeted that leaders are expected to meet again in January in an effort to seal a deal on the 2014 to 2020 budget.

The developer of the tallest skyscraper in London's financial district faces a legal challenge that could force it out of business after a dispute with the tower's builder, Reuters reported yesterday. Contractor Brookfield Multiplex launched a legal claim for about 16 million pounds ($25 million) against the owners of the 63-storey Pinnacle skyscraper this summer for payments relating to a 593 million pound construction contract.

Overriding opposition from lawmakers to filling the post with a man, European Union leaders have appointed Yves Mersch of Luxembourg to the executive board of the European Central Bank, the New York Times reported today. Mersch, who is currently the head of the Luxembourg central bank, will take the post on Dec. 15 for an eight-year term following a decision yesterday at a summit in Brussels, where leaders were seeking to hash out a long-term budget for the bloc.

Call it Greece vs. the bondholders, Round 2. Almost nine months after forcing private sector investors to stomach a 75 percent loss on their Greek bonds, the Greek government — with the support of Germany, its largest creditor — is weighing a plan to repurchase some debt at today’s market price of 25 to 27 cents, according to bankers and lawyers involved in the talks, The New York Times DealBook blog reported. The bid would be considerably below the 35 cent level that many large hedge fund that own the bonds have set as a minimum for getting a deal done.