The High Court has appointed a liquidator to the Dublin investment firm Custom House Capital after Central Bank inspectors found “systemic and deliberate misuse” of more than €56 million of client funds, the Irish Times reported. A 198-page report by two inspectors into the company described “a sort of Irish Ponzi scheme”, Mr Justice Gerard Hogan said. The judge directed the report to be referred to the Garda, Minister for Justice, Director of Public Prosecutions, Revenue Commissioners and the Director of Corporate Enforcement.

Europe’s efforts to solve its escalating debt crisis plunged into disarray Thursday, after Germany and France could not bridge their differences in time for a summit Sunday, forcing them to call a second meeting, The Washington Post reported. Sunday’s summit was supposed to deliver a comprehensive plan to finally get a grip on the currency union’s debt troubles by detailing new financing for debt-ridden Greece, a plan to make Europe’s banks fit to sustain worsening market turbulence and a scheme to make the eurozone bailout fund more powerful.

Dexia, the stricken Franco-Belgian lender that has been at the centre of recent market turmoil, loaned €1.5bn of fresh capital to its two largest institutional shareholders which then used the cash to buy Dexia shares before 2008, the Financial Times has learnt. The unorthodox funding move, which raised the Belgian regulators’ concerns at the time, amounted to Dexia borrowing money from itself to finance a capital increase. This is illegal in most jurisdictions and is now banned in the European Union, but did not break Belgium’s existing laws.

Distressed European Union banks that tap national governments or the region’s €440bn rescue fund for capital will be subject to state-aid penalties, involving compulsory restructuring or – in the worst case – orderly wind-downs, the Financial Times reported. The stance – on the agenda at this weekend’s EU summit – has emerged after intense debate between European officials and bankers over whether the plan for forced recapitalisations should be exempt from normal state-aid rules.

High-profile house builder Manor Park Homes is in receivership with debts of €170 million after the company’s directors told its bank that the business could not repay the money, the Irish Times reported. Businessman Joe Moran and his family own Manor Park, which made headlines eight years ago when it bought former taoiseach Charles Haughey’s estate in Kinsealy, Co Dublin, for €45 million.

Beleaguered Swedish carmaker Saab said on Thursday the administrator of its reorganisation plans to ask the court to halt the process, in a move that could force the company into bankruptcy, Agence France-Presse reported. Guy Lofalk, who has been appointed by the Vaenersborg district court in southwestern Sweden to oversee Saab's three-month restructuring process under bankruptcy protection, had informed the company he would ask that the process be terminated, Saab's Dutch owner Swedish Automobile (SWAN) said in a statement.

Irish fashion retailer A|wear has been sold to a UK group called Hilco, which specialises in distressed restructurings, the Irish Times reported. No financial details were released yesterday although Hilco said it would provide A|wear with “extended working capital facilities to facilitate the business’s financial needs”. A|wear was sold by Brown Thomas in 2007 for a reported €70 million to a consortium comprising UK private equity group Alchemy Partners and management, who took a 20 per cent stake in the business. The deal was backed with debt provided by Ulster Bank.

France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy flew to Frankfurt on Wednesday night for an emergency meeting with leading players in the eurozone crisis including German chancellor Angela Merkel, as Franco-German differences bedevilled attempts to agree a comprehensive package of measures, the Financial Times reported. The meeting broke up after two hours with neither the German or French leaders making any comment.

By now, it almost feels like a ritual: a strike and large demonstration disrupted by skirmishes and tear gas ahead of a parliamentary vote on new austerity measures that Greece needs to take to qualify for the next installment of aid the country needs to fend off default, the International Herald Tribune reported. But what was different on Wednesday, the first day of a two-day general strike before Parliament voted in the evening to approve new austerity measures, was the scale of the protest — tens of thousands of people — and the range of the demonstrators.

A double-notch downgrade to Spain’s credit ratings has piled more pressure on European leaders to make rapid progress on solving the region’s debt crisis or face unbearable borrowing costs, the Irish Times reported. The fresh blow from Moody’s Investors Service came just a day after the agency warned France its triple-A rating could be at risk and overshadowed a report that Germany and France were nearer a deal on leveraging the euro zone’s rescue fund.