Creditors of bankrupt refiner Petroplus's UK operations, mainly the Coryton refinery, will be paid a maximum of just 6.4 percent of their claims, said Steven Pearson, a joint administrator at PwC. The creditors will receive $102 million to $135 million, while their claims are estimated to total $2.1 billion to $2.4 billion, Pearson said on Tuesday. He said that losses of $22-$31 million, sustained in runnning the refinery between January and June, had reduced the amount available for distribution and demonstrated why he had to take the decision to close the plant down.

Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras's allies are pushing for two more years to implement unpopular austerity cuts before they sign off on them, sources close to the parties said on Monday, potentially delaying a deal on the savings demanded by lenders, Reuters reported. The three parties in Samaras's coalition have agreed on the bulk of the nearly 12 billion euros in cuts that Greece must produce to satisfy inspectors from the European Union and International Monetary Fund bailing out the nation.

Four years ago, Stephen Hester was cast as the savior of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC as it was being bailed out by U.K. taxpayers. Now the 51-year-old chief executive may risk having his tenure cut short by the latest scandal to hit the state-owned lender, The Wall Street Journal reported. RBS is negotiating a settlement with authorities investigating attempted interest-rate rigging at RBS and other banks, and a deal, including fines, could be announced in the next few months, according to people familiar with the matter.

Spain slid deeper into recession in the second quarter as a tough new round of austerity to head off the budget crisis that threatens the euro took effect both on overall demand and the price consumers have to pay for goods, the Irish Times reported. The first official numbers on gross domestic product showed the economy shrank 0.4 per cent from the previous quarter after contracting 0.3 per cent in the first three months of the year. The economy was 1 per cent smaller than a year earlier.

Air France-KLM said Monday its net loss ballooned to nearly €900 million ($1.1 billion) in the second quarter after it took a hefty charge to pay for restructuring that will see it shed about 10 percent of the airline's workforce, Bloomberg Businessweek reported on an Associated Press story. The Franco-Dutch airline operator said its net loss grew to €895 million in the three months to June 30, compared to a loss of €197 million a year earlier.

European policymakers are working on "last chance" options to bring Greece's debts down and keep it in the euro zone, with the ECB and national central banks looking at taking significant losses on the value of their bond holdings, officials said. Private creditors have already suffered big writedowns on their Greek bonds under a second bailout for Athens sealed in February, but this was not enough to put the country back on the path to solvency and a further restructuring is on the cards.

U.K. firms were gloomier about their own prospects in July, as the global outlook for trade deteriorated while the euro zone's debt crisis deepened, a trend that signals the country's economy could weaken further in the third quarter, a survey by Lloyds banking Group showed Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Hiring intentions among U.K. firms also fell and more companies were downbeat about expected profit margins, the survey showed.

The high street continued to be one of the areas of the economy most affected by the slowdown in growth in the UK, as data showed that the number of retail insolvencies rose 10.3 per cent last quarter even as the overall number of companies failing dropped, the Financial Times reported. There were 426 retail insolvencies recorded for the three months to June 30, according to research by PwC, compared with 386 in the same period in 2011. Retail insolvencies accounted for over a tenth of the overall number of corporate insolvencies in England and Wales recorded in the period.

Political leaders in Greece have agreed on most of the austerity measures demanded by its creditors and are now eyeing pension and wage cuts to find the final 1.5 billion euros of savings still needed, a source close to the talks said on Sunday, Reuters reported. Greece must find savings worth 11.5 billion euros for 2013 and 2014 to satisfy its increasingly impatient lenders, who are currently visiting Athens to evaluate the country's progress in complying with the terms of its latest bailout.

The European Central Bank cast more gloom over the euro zone's outlook Thursday, announcing another fall in lending to the private sector in June, as well as signs of increased deposit withdrawals from troubled banks in southern Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. The ECB's monthly summary of monetary developments in the euro area offered some crumbs of comfort, as both the narrow M1 and broad M3 money aggregates expanded faster than expected, bolstering hopes that the bank's liquidity injections around the turn of the year were finally gaining traction.