The new board and management at the international property company formerly owned by businessman Seán Quinn will seek to appoint a bankruptcy receiver to the family’s company in Sweden, the Irish Times reported. Mr Quinn and his family won a court ruling in Sweden last month over-ruling the dismissal of Quinn Investments Sweden by the receiver that was appointed by Anglo Irish Bank to its parent Irish company.

Cash-strapped Belarus has turned to the International Monetary Fund for a new loan, the Belarussian government said on its web site Wednesday, as a much-anticipated bailout from a Russian-led fund will likely be smaller than expected, The Wall Street Journal reported. Prime Minister Mikhail Myasnikovich said Belarus was seeking a loan of between $2.5 billion and $8 billion, the country's state-run news agency reported. Belarus devalued its ruble by 36% in May, after depleting its reserves by a quarter since the beginning of the year, trying to support the currency.

After almost a year of haggling, the Hungarian government struck a deal this week with the country’s banks to, in the words of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, “save the homes” of those who have mortgages in foreign currencies, the Emerging Europe blog reported. Home owners who financed their property with foreign-currency mortgages were hit hard over the past eight years because “nobody warned them,” not even the people whose job it was, about the risks of foreign currency fluctuations, Mr. Orban said referring to the previous Socialist government’s term in power.

KBC NV is mulling changes to its restructuring plan, but it is too early to give a date for repaying state aid, the Belgian bank said Wednesday, Dow Jones reported. "KBC confirms that, as good business practice and as a reflection of sound management, it is currently pro-actively examining what the added value of certain changes to its strategic plan could be," the bank said in an emailed statement.

The results of Europe's latest round of bank "stress tests" will be delayed until July as European regulators worry that banks and their national supervisors submitted overly optimistic data, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported. The European Banking Authority previously had planned to publish the test results later this month. That is getting pushed back as the EBA requires banks to resubmit data about how they would fare in an economic downturn, these people said.

The seasonally adjusted Live Register rose by 2,600 in May, bringing the total number of people signing on to more than 443,000, new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO)have shown, the Irish Times reported. The increase pushed the standardised unemployment rate slightly higher in May, to 14.8 per cent compared with 14.7 per cent a month earlier. The Live Register also includes casual and part-time workers. The official unemployment rate is measured by the CSO’s Quarterly National Household Survey, which showed the rate was 14.7 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year.

The Spanish government Tuesday said it cut its budget deficit in half in the first four months of the year and that efforts to overhaul the country's ailing finances are on track despite slippages from regional authorities, The Wall Street Journal reported. Finance ministry data showed that the central government slashed its January-April deficit by 53% on the year to €2.45 billion, equal to 0.2% of gross domestic product. But the finance ministry also said the country's 17 regions—which collectively control about one third of spending—had a deficit equal to 0.5% of GDP.

Insolvencies in the British construction sector surged in the first quarter, rising for the first time in two years and raising fears that government cuts were hitting the sector harder than first feared, Reuters reported. The number of businesses going bankrupt climbed 19 percent to 948 from 796 in the prior quarter as fiscal stimulus for infrastructure projects dried up, according to a report from Wilkins Kennedy. Government plans to scrap public sector building programmes, such as Building Schools for the Future, has fuelled bankruptcies and fears of a prolonged downturn.

The family of businessman Seán Quinn have brought Commercial Court proceedings claiming that loans of about €2.34 billion made by Anglo Irish Bank to various Quinn companies and Cypriot-registered companies are unenforceable because they were issued for “an illegal objective of market manipulation” — support of the Anglo share price, the Irish Times reported. The action by Mrs Patricia Quinn and her five children — Aoife, Colette, Brenda, Ciara and Seán Quinn Jnr — arises from events of the past two years that led to the family losing control of companies in the Quinn group.

The European Union is racing to draft a second bailout package for Greece to release vital loans next month and avert the risk of the euro zone country defaulting, EU officials said on Monday, Reuters reported. A total restructuring of Greece's massive debt was not an option, he said, leaving the door open to some tweaking of Greece's debt profile that might involve the private sector, as Sarkozy advocated last week.