Europe

Austria's banks exert an outsize influence beyond the country's borders. In the 1990s, after the fall of communism, banks based in Vienna expanded eastward and came to dominate finance in Eastern Europe. Today, however, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine--where Austrian banks nearly cornered the market--have sought emergency aid from the International Monetary Fund. Foreign investors are fleeing Eastern Europe, worried that the problems could spread. Credit-rating agencies have warned that Austrian banks are highly exposed if Eastern European borrowers trigger a wave of defaults.

UBS AG, the Swiss bank’s Luxembourg units and Ernst & Young LLP were sued over their alleged “serious faults” in the supervision of a fund that invested about 95 percent of its assets with confessed fraudster Bernard Madoff, Bloomberg reported. About 70 investors whose money was put into Access International Advisors LLC’s LuxAlpha Sicav-American Selection sued UBS, which was the fund’s custodian bank and Ernst & Young, its auditor, in a Luxembourg court, seeking compensation for their losses, Pierre Reuter, one of the lawyers, said today.

Russia’s government may buy a stake in billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s Indian mobile-phone unit to help his holding company AFK Sistema pay off debt. “It’s only at the discussion stage and a lot will depend on the Indian side, which is also a shareholder in this company,” First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said in an interview in his office in Moscow yesterday. Sistema Shyam TeleServices Ltd. has licenses to operate in all of India’s 22 regulatory regions, which have a combined population of more than 1 billion.

Europe risks being the last region to pull itself out of recession unless it can present a united front on the economic crisis and bulk up stimulus plans, according to the head of Italy’s business lobby group. Emma Marcegaglia, president of Confindustria, told the Financial Times in a video interview that the Group of 20 summit in London next month was doomed to failure if Europe did not take a co-ordinated approach to ending the crisis and forget about side issues such as hedge fund regulation, the Financial Times reported.

Policy makers in the U.K. and Germany set out plans to place a much heavier regulatory burden on banks and other financial institutions in a sign of how rules throughout Europe are likely to change in the wake of the financial crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. In the U.K., Lord Adair Turner, chairman of the country's financial watchdog, laid out recommendations for what he called a "profound" overhaul of banking supervision that, if adopted, will mark the end of more than a decade of light regulation in one of the world's financial centers.

At least 17 of the 20 major nations that vowed at a November summit to avoid protectionist steps that could spark a global trade war have violated that promise, with countries from Russia to the United States to China enacting measures aimed at limiting the flow of imported goods, according to a World Bank report unveiled yesterday. The report underscores a "worrying" trend toward protectionism as countries rush to shield their ailing domestic industries during the global economic crisis, The Washington Post reported.

German carmaker Opel and its U.S. parent General Motors have, to the knowledge of the German government, sufficient financing to see them through into April, a junior economy minister said on Wednesday. "What is positive is that money is apparently still there for them to carry on," Dagmar Woehrl told reporters in Berlin. Woehrl added that Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg's visit to the United States earlier this week had moved the Opel issue "a step forward." She added, however, that some questions remained open.

Ukraine's central bank on Monday placed two more banks in receivership, Rodovid Bank, the country's 20th largest, and BIG Energia, which ranks 66th of the more than 180 banks operating in the country. The decisions brought to 11 the number of banks in Ukraine in receivership and operating under restrictions. At the end of last month, Rodovid's shareholders proposed that the government play a role in adding to the bank's capitalisation and said they were ready to transfer no less than 50 percent of its shares plus one to state hands. The government has yet to agree to the proposal.

Finance chiefs from the Group of 20 vowed to work together to clean up the toxic assets that helped trigger the financial crisis and led banks to rack up more than $1 trillion in losses, Bloomberg reported. Officials meeting near London this weekend outlined guidelines on how governments should rid banks of distressed securities that have devastated companies from Citigroup Inc. to Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.

The European Commission said on Friday that it had launched an in-depth investigation into the restructuring of Belgian-French financial group Dexia, Reuters reported. The Commission said in a statement it intended to make sure the restructuring plan would guarantee the long-term viability of the group, hit hard by the financial crisis. But the executive arm of the 27-nation European Union also authorised guarantees worth $16.9 billion from the Belgian and French governments to aid in the sale of FSA, the bank's U.S. subsidiary.