Europe

Spanish property group Tremon on Monday said it had filed for administration after failing to meet debt payments, hurting shares in banks which have total exposure of around 1 billion euros ($1.27 billion), Reuters reported. Tremon is the second large Spanish property group to seek administration this year following Martinsa Fadesa. Among its biggest creditors are Banco Popular, with around 200 million euros exposure, unlisted savings bank Bancaja with 100 million followed by Banco Pastor with 95 million.

PIK Group, one of Russia’s largest residential construction companies, plunged as much as 43 percent in London on Monday after JPMorgan Chase & Co. downgraded the developer to "underweight" from "overweight" on concern that it may default on some debt, The Moscow Times reported today. The developer may be unable to repay $700 million of debt due this year as the Moscow city government seeks to overturn housing orders PIK won in October and renegotiate prices, Elena Jouronova, a property analyst at JPMorgan in Moscow, wrote in a note to clients Monday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday after meeting with leaders of Adam Opel GmbH that it was "not yet determined" whether the automaker would be given 1 billion euros ($1.25 billion) in loan guarantees from the government, the Associated Press reported yesterday. Opel, a subsidiary of General Motors Corp., is seeking the guarantees because the company expects difficult credit conditions on the open market due to the world financial crisis. Merkel said that government officials planned further talks on the issue and should come to a decision by Christmas.

Eighty-five companies worldwide defaulted on their debt in the year through November 11, impacting a total of $284 billion, up sharply from the two previous years, Standard & Poor's said Monday. By comparison, there were only 22 defaults for all of 2007 and 30 in 2006, Reuters reported. Seventy of the 85 companies are based in the United States, five in Europe, four in Asia, three in Canada, two in Mexico and one in Russia, according to Diane Vazza, head of S&P's fixed income group.

Troubled German lender Hypo Real Estate reported Monday a net loss of 3.1 billion euros ($4 billion) in the third quarter as the financial crisis worsened, with a unit in Ireland hit especially hard by write-downs on the values of its assets, the Associated Press reported.

Troubled Italian airline Alitalia's debts have soared to some 2.3 billion euros, the company's special administrator said Sunday as a pilot and air crew strike caused a seventh day of cancelled flights, Agence France-Presse reported today. Augusto Fantozzi told RAI television he had "around two billion in ordinary debt for the supply of goods and services," before taking into account a 300-million-euro government loan. Alitalia's last publicly recorded debts going back to mid-2008 were 1.2 billion euros, although that figure did not include bills from suppliers.

Japan, the world's second-largest economy, has fallen into recession, the government said Monday. The country's gross domestic product contracted at an annual rate of 0.4 percent from July to September, marking the second consecutive quarter of negative growth, the Washington Post reported today. Japan's economy minister warned that the situation could worsen: Collapsing sales of Japanese goods in the United States and Europe amid the global downturn threaten to make the country's export-dependent economy even weaker in coming months.

Iceland agreed that European regulations require it to guarantee accounts of hundreds of thousands of Britons and other foreigners who are frozen in the online arm of one of the nation's collapsed banks, the government said Sunday. Recognition of the legal principle, which came in talks with European Union representatives, is a significant step toward freeing up a $2.1 billion bailout package from the International Monetary Fund, the Wall Street Journal reported today.

Administrators of the European arm of failed investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. are meeting with creditors in London on Friday to sketch out the group's assets and liabilities, The Straits Times reported today. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which was drafted in as administrator to Lehman Brothers International (Europe) to unravel the complex web of the firm's tens of thousands of trades and attempt to claw back funds for creditors, said it will provide an update after the meeting.

Icelanders will take to the streets in the thousands tomorrow to protest the government's failure to clinch a $6 billion International Monetary Fund-led loan while countries in less dire economic straits jump the IMF queue, Bloomberg reported today. Weekly protests in downtown Reykjavik may swell to 20,000 soon, or 6 percent of the population, said Andres Magnusson, chief executive of the Icelandic Federation of Trade and Services. The Atlantic island, which had the fifth-highest per capita income in the world last year, needs the money to finance imports and revive the banking system.