Sazka AS, the Czech Republic's struggling state-owned lottery company, Monday said it has teamed up with two domestic financial firms to repay overdue principal on its euro-denominated bonds and stave off bankruptcy. "Sazka [can now] provide the financial means necessary to prevent the company from moving into insolvency," said Martin Ulcak, owner of E-Invest, a privately-held Czech financial company that is one of the two firms partnering with Sazka. Most of the capital will come from Penta Investments, a Slovak-Czech private equity firm.

Ireland's main opposition party Fine Gael on Friday said the next government would be forced to "unilaterally" restructure the debt of Irish banks if agreement cannot be reached with Europe on senior bond holders sharing the cost of recapitalizing the country's insolvent banks, The Wall Street Journal reported. Fine Gael, the favourite to form the next coalition government, said ideally senior bond holders in nationalized banks, such as Anglo Irish Bank Corp. and Irish Nationwide Building Society, would be forced to share the burden through a Europe-wide framework.

The UK's largest pre-pack administration in which EMI's executives in effect wrested control of the music company from private equity firm Terra Firma last week may prompt financial sponsors of other highly leveraged businesses to review their groups' structures to prevent such management seizures, International Financing Review reported. Citigroup took control of EMI through the largest pre-pack administration seen in the UK at 3.4bn pounds.

A dispute over loan security with their bank prevented the Taggart brothers from bringing up to £70 million of new capital into their construction business and ultimately led to its collapse, according to Michael Taggart, who confirmed at the weekend that he and his brother John are suing Ulster Bank, the Irish Times reported.

Small Danish bank Amagerbanken said on Sunday that it failed to meet solvency requirements and had agreed to be taken over by state administrators who will wind up the bank's remaining activities, Reuters reported. Amagerbanken, the 10th small Danish bank to fall into the state's hands due to the effects of the 2008-09 financial crisis, said in a statement that fourth-quarter writedowns had wiped out its equity. It said it had agreed to transfer its assets to Finansiel Stabilitet A/S, the state company that administers failed banks, and the administrators would close the bank.

The National Asset Management Agency has lost a legal challenge in the Supreme Court taken by property investor Paddy McKillen to stop the transfer of €2.1 billion of loans to the State’s “bad bank”, the Irish Times reported. The seven-judge court unanimously allowed his appeal – overturning a High Court ruling – after it found Nama had never at any stage made a legally valid decision to acquire Mr McKillen’s loans. The Supreme Court ruled the decision taken by Nama to acquire his loans was taken before the agency was legally set up and no subsequent act changed this.

European leaders in Brussels on Friday are expected to confirm the broad outline of a strategy for solving the debt crisis, in a move that is seen as a decisive moment for the euro zone, The Wall Street Journal reported. For more than a year, since Greece's budget meltdown sparked a crisis of confidence in the euro zone's financial stability, Europe has struggled to react to events driven by panicky financial markets. After weeks of lead-up, much rides on the credibility of the new strategy.

Splitting up state-backed German lender WestLB would be the most sensible scenario for the ailing bank, the head of Germany's biggest regional savings banks association said Tuesday, as pressure mounts on WestLB and its shareholders to drastically reduce the bank's size and find new owners by the end of 2011, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported.

The gloom that descended on European consumers in 2008 shows no signs of lifting, with rising prices and the threat of low or falling real wages adding to concerns about jobs and the prospect, if not yet the fact, of higher taxes, The Wall Street Journal reported. Much of this is not surprising. Economists may not know a great deal about how the world works, but one thing they are pretty sure about is that the fallout from a financial crisis is longer and more painful than that of most other triggers of recession.

Ireland's parliament was dissolved Tuesday for a long-awaited Feb. 25 election as Prime Minister Brian Cowen exited the political stage defending his management of the nation's plunge toward bankruptcy, the Associated Press reported. Cowen declared a formal end to his government two months after he was forced to negotiate a euro67.5 billion ($92 billion) loan package from the European Union and International Monetary Fund, a measure he had insisted Ireland did not need. Cowen told a silent, somber parliament that his 2 1/2 years as prime minister "have been a time of great trial and test.