An investor in the private equity consortium bidding for EBS building society – one of two final bidders for the lender – says that debt forgiveness for its borrowers would only be considered in limited cases or not at all, The Irish Times reported. Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, who is part of the consortium led by Dublin-based Cardinal Capital Group, said he was still optimistic about EBS and Ireland, despite fears of a further wave of mortgage losses and the debt crisis.

Europe's debt crisis entered a critical new phase as Ireland resisted pressure from the European Central Bank and national governments to seek a bailout amid growing concern that the currency bloc could unravel, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ireland fiercely denied that it was in bailout talks, and European officials publicly insisted Dublin was under no pressure to seek help.

The International Monetary Fund said it needs more time to gauge the impact on Iceland’s finances of plans to forgive mortgage obligations as the government responds to last month’s protests demanding debt relief, Bloomberg reported. “Broad agreement has been reached on policies that can deliver program objectives but more time is needed to assess the impact of new measures under consideration to facilitate household debt restructuring,” the IMF said in a statement.

There may have been good news for home building group McInerney this week, when Ireland’s High Court extended its period of examinership protection, but elsewhere, there was a further sign of the difficulties in the construction industry with the release of Ulster Bank’s Purchasing Managers’ index (PMI) for October, InsolvencyJournal.ie reported. The PMI shows an increase in the rate of decline in construction activity, for the second month running, to 42.3 in October, from 44.5 in September. A reading below 50 indicates a reduction in activity.

Ireland warned on Thursday that a surge in its borrowing costs to record highs had become "very serious" and the EU said it was ready to act should the humbled former "Celtic Tiger" require a rescue from its euro partners, Reuters reported. European officials said they were monitoring developments in Ireland closely but denied for a second day running that Dublin was seeking financial aid, in an ominous echo of the rhetoric that preceded an EU/IMF bailout of Greece six months ago.

Nearly a fifth of jobs at maintenance and building services group Rok PLC are to go, after the company followed peer Connaught PLC in to administration following a prolonged spell of plunging profits amid tough trading conditions, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Rok's administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers late Wednesday announced 711 job losses at the firm, which employs about 3,800 people, in areas where there was no work to be carried out or where there was "little or no interest" from prospective buyers.

Nama and the banks have taken effective control of Michael McNamara and Company, one of the biggest building and civil engineering groups in the Republic, after the State's assets agency rejected the group’s business plan, The Irish Times reported. It is understood that the group voluntarily asked Dublin accountants and corporate insolvency specialist, Farrell Grant Sparks, to take over as receiver late last night.

Two Dublin-based estate agencies are to go into direct competition with insolvency accountants to handle the ever-increasing number of properties going into receivership, The Irish Times reported. The agencies are in the process of setting up individual insolvency divisions to manage non-performing property assets while a strategy is agreed to realise their maximum value. Commercial agent HWBC has formed a 50:50 joint venture company with UK agent Allsop to offer fixed-charge receivership in the Republic.

Most big Asian banks will be exempted from a global regulatory regime under the latest proposal for the industry from the world’s leading economies, which aims to prevent another financial crisis, the Financial Times reported. People briefed on the agenda for the G20 summit, which begins in Seoul on Thursday, said officials had concluded that global regulators should focus on big banks with global businesses, stripping out domestically focused institutions without the reach of the industry’s cross-border companies.

Interviews with dozens of bank and government officials, and an examination of documents released by the Irish parliament, reveal that Ireland misjudged its crisis early on. Desperate to preserve the homegrown banking system, the government—blind to just how sour Irish loans had gone—yoked the fate of the nation to the fate of its banks, The Wall Street Journal reported in an analysis. Along the way, the government was hobbled by faulty information from outside advisers, from a trust-and-don't-verify regulatory culture and from the troubled banks themselves.