An interim report by the examiner of several Irish companies in the McInerney Group may have enormous implications for the rights of creditors and the examinership process, according to a leading corporate restructuring and insolvency solicitor, InsolvencyJournal.ie reported. Julie Murphy-O’Connor is a partner in the Corporate Restructuring and Insolvency Law Group at Matheson Ormsby Prentice solicitors. She said the report by the examiner, Billy Riordan of Price Waterhouse Coopers, will be of major interest to Irish lenders and companies.

Cattles, which specialises in loans to people with poor credit histories, faces a crunch week of talks with its lenders this week as the stricken firm struggles to avoid insolvency, The Guardian reported. The restructuring firm Zolfo Cooper has been lined up as administrator if the talks fail, although sources insisted that a consensual agreement between the parties is still possible. As many as 3,000 jobs could be threatened if the firm goes under.

The closure of Bank of Scotland Ireland (BOSI) at the end of the year will leave many small and medium Irish businesses in a “precarious situation” in relation to short-term financing such as invoice discounting and overdraft facilities, according to the CEO of the Irish Small and Medium Enterprise (ISME) association, InsolvencyJournal.ie reported. Mark Fielding mentioned hotels, in particular, as potentially having trouble sourcing alternate working capital. “Very few of them would have good accounts to show for the past two years,” he said.

The tactic of investors buying bank debt to gain control of distressed companies is set to increase, a leading insolvency expert has predicted, The Irish Times reported. Tom Kavanagh, a partner in Kavanagh Fennell, acted as receiver for the Irish operations of Calyx Group, which was forced into receivership on September 3rd after Better Capital bought its debt from Anglo Irish Bank. Calyx, a diverse group of technology companies with operations in Ireland and Britain, had been struggling with debts of more than €100 million.

Tele Columbus GmbH, a German cable company operator, will restructure €1 billion ($1.2 billion) of loans in a U.K. court, according to three people familiar with the situation, Bloomberg reported. The company, controlled by Dusseldorf, Germany-based restructuring specialist Nikolaus & Co., will attend a first court hearing on Sept. 22 to reduce its debt burden in a so- called scheme of arrangement procedure, said the people, who declined to be identified because the discussions are private. An official at the High Court of London Chancery Division confirmed the hearing date.

So loud are the howls of protest from his socialist opponents, one might think that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France is about to put the nation's elderly to work in coal mines or turn them into an army of street sweepers. In fact, he is proposing merely to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62 by 2018 and also to increase by two years the age of full pension entitlement, The Wall Street Journal reported in a commentary. This relatively modest change has provoked thousands of protestors into angry demonstrations and union leaders to threaten a series of strikes.

The U.K. government set out proposals Thursday for a new special administration regime to more effectively handle investment bank insolvencies to minimize the impact on financial stability, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The scheme is designed to handle the insolvency of failing banks that aren't put into the U.K.'s existing special resolution regime, developed to ensure a systemically-important bank is rescued or sold off very quickly to avoid financial contagion.

Failed Latvian lender Parex won European Union regulatory approval on Wednesday for its plan to split up its sound assets into a new bank as part of a restructuring to ensure its viability, Reuters reported. Parex's state bailout in November 2008 was one of the reasons why Latvia had to take an International Monetary Fund and European Union 7.5 billion euro ($9.75 billion) rescue package last year. Latvia handed over a restructuring plan for Parex, the country's second-largest bank prior to the credit crisis, to the European Commission in March.

Greece’s finance minister has strongly rejected the idea that Athens will be forced to restructure its debts, saying that a default would break the eurozone. On a two-day visit to London, Paris and Frankfurt to convince investors that Athens has turned a corner in its year-long economic crisis, George Papaconstantinou told the Financial Times that a Greek default would spark selling in other so-called peripheral bond markets of Portugal and Ireland. “Restructuring is not going to happen.

Some 1.5 million unfinished, unsold or unwanted residential units stand scattered across Spain, products of a still-deflating housing bubble that threatens to undermine the country’s broader economy for years to come, The Wall Street Journal reported.