British home improvement retailer Focus DIY is to close with the possible loss of up to 3,000 jobs, after administrators were unable to find buyers for the bulk of its stores, they said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Administrators at Ernst & Young said they had appointed retail consultants Gordon Brothers to advise on the sale of all Focus DIY's stock with a view to shutting the chain. The closing down sale will begin this weekend.

While Europe is preoccupied with a possible restructuring of Greece's debt, huge risks lurk elsewhere -- in the balance sheet of the European Central Bank. The guardian of the single currency has taken on billions of euros worth of risky securities as collateral for loans to shore up the banks of struggling nations, Spiegel Online reported. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, banks in countries like Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece have unloaded risks amounting to several hundred billion euros with central banks.

Financial regulators need to develop stricter rules for dealing with failed banks to assure that shareholders and creditors rather than taxpayers bear the loss, Sweden's Financial Supervisory Authority said Tuesday in its yearly Supervision Report for 2011, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported.

The Prague Municipal Court declared Czech developer ECM insolvent on Tuesday and the stock exchange halted trading in the firm's shares, Reuters reported. The developer, which builds mainly in the Czech capital, filed for insolvency on May 17 and proposed reorganisation. The court said it would decide on the reorganisation plan within three months, the filing said. The company accumulated debt as an economic downturn pounded the construction and development sector which only began to recover this year in the Czech Republic.

The dispute between Europe's central bankers and politicians over how to deal with Greece's worsening financial problems intensified, as one of the European Central Bank's top officials rejected calls by Germany and other euro-zone states for a restructuring of Greek debt—calling it a "horror scenario," The Wall Street Journal reported.

Credit rating agency Moody’s has warned that Ireland could be pushed further into financial turmoil if Greece restructures its debt, saying bailout recipients could have debt downgraded to “junk” status if Athens defaults, the Irish Times reported. Amid renewed market attention on Spain and anxiety about new credit downgrades of Italy and Belgium, Moody’s made it clear yesterday that a Greek default would be “highly destabilising” and would have implications for the creditworthiness of bond issuers across Europe.

Fissures among Europe’s currency partners are becoming even deeper and more widespread than was previously evident, raising new doubts about whether the group can resolve the regional debt crisis that has simmered for more than a year, the International Herald Tribune reported. The markets seem to reflect the growing discord within the 17-member euro zone currency union, barely a year after European governments came together with a 750 billion euro ($1 trillion) safety net for debtor-nation members.

As banks across Europe clean up their balance sheets, it is causing a feeding frenzy among hedge funds and private-equity firms hungry for their troubled assets, The Wall Street Journal reported. Many marquee funds are flocking around the dozens of European lenders that recently have ratcheted up efforts to get rid of soured loans and other assets, a legacy of profligate lending and investing before the financial crisis.

AIB and Bank of Ireland have lent €8 billion to small and medium business in the last year, €2 billion more than government targets, according to the latest quarterly report from the Credit Review Office, the Irish Times reported. The two main Irish banks – which are responsible for about 60 per cent of the lending market – had been required to lend €3 billion each to SMEs this year, as a condition of the State’s support for the banks.

The International Monetary Fund has issued its strongest hint yet that other European countries and EU institutions should share the costs of Ireland’s banking crisis, the Irish Times reported. During a telephone conference Saturday, Ajai Chopra – the most senior fund official dealing with the Ireland brief – said Ireland’s problems were “a shared European problem that requires a shared European solution”. He said more European funding needed to be made available for bailed-out countries if the euro area crisis is to be contained.