Europe

Ireland's high cost economy has priced itself out of the market in key business areas, and workers will have to take wage cuts of up to 15 per cent to regain competitiveness, according to the head of the country’s foreign investment promotion board, the Financial Times reported. Barry O’Leary, chief executive of the Industrial Development Authority, said Ireland would have to cut costs to win back investments in areas such as call centres, which are labour intensive but low paid.

Paris has set aside €100 million in stimulus funds earmarked for what the French like to call their cultural patrimony, The New York Times reported. It is a French twist on how to overcome the global downturn, spending borrowed money avidly to beautify the nation even as it also races ahead of the United States in more classic Keynesian ways: fixing potholes, upgrading railroads and pursuing other “shovel ready” projects.

China's Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. plans to present a detailed bid for General Motors Corp.'s Opel unit in Europe within the next few days, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday, a move that could complicate the U.S. auto maker's effort to sell Opel to Canadian supplier Magna International Inc., The Wall Street Journal reported. In May, GM signed a memorandum of understanding to sell a majority stake in Opel and its U.K. sister brand, Vauxhall, to Magna, whose bid is backed by Russia's Sberbank Rossia and auto maker OAO GAZ Group.

The International Monetary Fund approved plans on Wednesday to issue its own debt to strengthen its capacity to fund bail-outs, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, the World Bank said it committed a record $59 billion in loans and guarantees to developing countries in the year to June 30.

The European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, said Thursday that it would release badly needed funds to Latvia to help the struggling Baltic nation head off a collapse of its economy and maintain its currency link to the euro, The New York Times reported. The commission said in Brussels that it would release €1.2 billion ($1.7 billion), the second installment of a 7.5 billion euro financing package that the country secured in December with the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and other international lenders.

Cemex SAB, the largest cement maker in the Americas, takes its proposal for restructuring $14.5 billion of bank debt to Madrid today after presenting the offer to lenders in New York earlier this week, Bloomberg reported. Monterrey, Mexico-based Cemex is seeking to extend the maturity of the debt to February 2014 from the current 2009 through 2011, the company said yesterday. Cemex also said in a U.S. securities filing that it may need to issue debt, stock or equity-linked notes and that its auditors “expressed substantial doubt” about the company’s ability to stay in business.

No villas in the south of France for Russia’s top bankers this summer, if Vladimir Putin gets his way, the Financial Times reported. Russia’s prime minister has sternly warned bank chiefs not to plan any holidays until they have sorted out the financing of the country’s recession-hit economy. It will take a huge effort, with output forecast to fall by about 8 per cent this year and hopes of a quick recovery fading. Even the big state-owned banks that dominate the sector are under pressure, with VTB, the second-largest, warning of possible annual losses.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) known as the bank for central banks, which was founded in Basel, Switzerland in 1930, issued its 79th Annual Report, and said financial products should be treated like medicines and sold to consumers only when they are certified safe to prevent a repeat of global financial crisis, Finfacts reported. The BIS said government efforts to revive the global economy might have only a temporary impact because banks are not being pushed hard enough to fix their underlying problems.

American Life Insurance Company (Alico) will restructure its western European businesses in order to generate cost savings, according to an internal document obtained by Reuters. The letter -- signed by Alico Chairman and Chief Executive Rodney Martin -- says Alico will merge its continental and western European business with that of its UK and Irish business to form one new entity. An Alico Europe spokesman said it was too early to assess what impact this move might have on jobs. Earlier this week, the U.S.

Shortly before the crash of Latvia’s Ogres Komercbanka, the bank's council chairman Arturs Jeresjko transferred his property to his family, Baltic Business News reported. A year ago Jeresjko was among 50 largest land owners in Latvia and was on the list of Latvian millionaires. According to the State Land Register, Jeresjko owned nearly 900 hectares of land last year.