Former clients of Lehman Brothers' European operations voted in favor of a plan to speed up the return of about $11 billion in frozen client assets, the collapsed bank's European administrator said Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported. The administrator, PricewaterhouseCoopers, said more than 90% of the bank's former clients voted for the plan, a multilateral contract known as a claim-resolution agreement. The agreement governs the basis on which the administrators can return the assets.

General Motors has extended a December 31 deadline for bids for its Swedish car brand Saab, which will restart some production lines in January after a shutdown, Saab said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. GM had given itself to the end of this month to consider bids for loss-making Saab while continuing a process to wind down the company, which has drawn interest from Dutch luxury carmaker Spyker Cars and others.

Under the Italian government's tax amnesty plan, assets worth €95 billion (about $137 billion) have been declared, of which 98% will be repatriated in Italy, the Italian Economy Ministry said Tuesday, citing data as of Dec. 15. In an emailed statement, the ministry also said that the extension of the tax amnesty to April 2010 would be the "last one and definitive." In December, Italian Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti announced the extension of the plan but with higher fees. Italians who repatriate assets by Feb.

The Netherlands, Germany and Austria have all relied heavily on so-called short-work programs to keep people in their jobs in the wake of the financial crisis. All three have managed to keep unemployment from soaring, but the Dutch have been particularly effective, The Wall Street Journal reported. At 3.7% in October, according to the European Union statistics office, the country's jobless rate is one of the lowest among the world's wealthy nations. After the crisis hit, the Dutch government, labor unions and employers quickly reached an agreement to begin payroll subsidies.

Italy’s amnesty for tax evaders holding funds outside the country has been successful in attracting more than €80 billion so far, Giulio Tremonti, the finance minister, declared on Wednesday in setting out a record haul for the centre-right government, the Financial Times reported. The figure, equal to about 5 per cent of gross domestic product, sets a record for an overseas tax amnesty for Italians. It also confirms Italy as the European league leader in successful tax amnesties, thanks to the generous terms and anonymity offered.

The International Monetary Fund has turned down recession-battered Ukraine’s plea for a $2bn emergency loan before the New Year, a senior Ukrainian official said on Wednesday, citing his country’s failure to adopt a fiscally prudent 2010 budget and muster political consensus ahead of a hotly contested presidential election, the Financial Times reported.

Foreign investors were a major force in New York’s real estate boom of the last decade, with families and companies from Dubai to Australia swallowing weekend apartments and Midtown office towers. In 2007, the roster of international investors came to include a British firm, Dawnay Day, whose executives had a splashy reputation for spending millions on fine art and yachts, The New York Times reported. The efforts [to regentrify East Harlem neighborhoods], though, didn’t get far before the recession spread across the globe and Dawnay Day went bust.

Moody's Investors Service on Tuesday became the third ratings agency to downgrade Greece's sovereign debt rating, saying that the Greek government's long-term credit strength was "eroding materially," The Wall Street Journal reported. The ratings agency cut the country's government bond ratings to A2 from A1. Moody's also gave Greece a negative outlook and said future ratings decisions will hinge on the government following through with deficit-reduction plans. But Greek stock and bond markets rallied after the Moody's downgrade.

Gordon Brown received a twin blow today when a leading ratings agency warned Britain to get a tighter grip on its record budget deficit and figures revealed that the slump of the past 18 months was now officially the deepest since the second world war, The Guardian reported. Fitch said that the UK – along with France and Spain – needed to "articulate more credible and stronger fiscal consolidation during the course of 2010 to underpin confidence in the sustainability of public finances".

Spyker Cars, the tiny Dutch automaker whose last-ditch bid for Saab was rejected Friday by General Motors, came back Sunday with a renewed offer for the struggling Swedish icon, which G.M. has said it plans to shut down, The New York Times reported. A spokesman for G.M. reacted cautiously to Spyker’s new offer, which many industry insiders consider a long shot. However, he said other potential buyers had expressed interest in Saab since Friday’s announcement.