Lending to euro-zone businesses picked up again in November, posting its strongest annual rate of growth in over a year, the European Central Bank said today, according to the Wall Street Journal. The ECB said that lending to the private sector rose by a combined €21 billion ($27.55 billion) in November and was up 2 percent on a yearly basis, due to positive net flows of €10 billion to households and €11 billion to businesses.

When the treaty establishing Europe’s common currency was approved in the early 1990s, Europe’s political and business elite had high hopes that it would bind the Continent’s disparate economies and often bickering nations as never before, the New York Times reported today. As the euro made its debut in the early 2000s, there was an outpouring of support from many citizens pleased that they would no longer have to change Spanish pesetas to French francs or Dutch guilders to German marks as they crossed borders from one country to another.

Multinational companies are facing a new British law they fear will force them to rethink their compliance strategies and upend their business practices, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The new law, called the Bribery Act, takes effect in April and it resembles the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which bars companies that trade on U.S. exchanges from bribing foreign government officials to gain a business advantage. The British law, however, is more sweeping than its American counterpart, and corporate legal advisers are uncertain how extensive the fallout might be.

Credit Suisse Group is selling a $2.8 billion portfolio of soured commercial-property loans to Apollo Management LP for $1.2 billion, marking one of the largest bank sales of distressed real estate loans since the downturn, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The properties backed by the loans include apartment buildings in Germany and hotels in Denmark, Sweden and France, many of them of lower quality and in hard-hit locales.

Bankers’ pay should be more transparent to investors to prevent lenders from hiding policies that encourage irresponsible risk taking, global regulators said in draft proposals, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. International rules on the disclosure of pay “will allow market participants to assess the quality of a bank’s compensation practices and the incentives towards risk taking they support,” said Fernando Vargas, chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s task force on remuneration.

Fitch Ratings cut its rating on Portugal, citing concerns about a "deteriorating near-term economic outlook" and a "much more difficult financing environment" for the European nation's government and banks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The ratings agency also kept its ratings outlook negative, meaning future downgrades are possible, as it warned that additional measures might be needed to realize the government's deficit-reduction targets.

A Russian judge has convicted Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Yukos oil tycoon, and his former business partner, Platon Lebedev, of embezzlement and money laundering in a politically-charged trial that could keep the Kremlin foes in jail for six more years, the Financial Times reported today. Khodorkovsky’s lead defense lawyer immediately said his defense team would appeal, decrying the decision as prefabricated and claiming pressure had clearly been applied on the judge.

Ireland's minister for finance, Brian Lenihan, announced plans to effectively nationalize Allied Irish Banks PLC with a capital injection of €3.7 billion ($4.85 billion), giving the government ownership of more than 90 percent, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Allied Irish Banks received €3.5 billion in state aid in 2009, but the bank needs another €3.7 billion by year end to meet its target of boosting its core Tier 1 capital to 8 percent of risk-weighted assets.

Net mortgage lending by U.K. banks was at its weakest in over 10 years in November as demand for new homes slowed, as is typical for this time of the year, data from the British Bankers Association showed on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Seasonally-adjusted net mortgage lending grew £1.5 billion ($2.31 billion) in October. That was the smallest increase since a £1.3 billion gain in August 1999 and compares with gains of £1.7 billion in October and £2.8 billion a year earlier.

Ireland's Finance Minister Brian Lenihan today announced plans to recapitalize Allied Irish Banks PLC by €3.7 billion ($3.93 billion) to meet the financial regulator's year-end capital requirements, effectively making it the fourth Irish lender to be nationalized, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Allied Irish Banks already received €3.5 billion in state aid in 2009, but the bank needs another €3.7 billion by year-end to meet its 8% Core Tier 1 target and, observers say, another €6.1 billion by the end of February to meet the financial regulator's 12% Core Tier 1 target.