Italian car maker Fiat SpA is in talks to buy a stake in General Motors Corp.'s German-based unit Adam Opel GmbH as part of a wide-ranging strategy to become one of the world's largest auto makers, according to people familiar with the matter. Fiat Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne held talks in Berlin last week with German Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who is leading the German government's search for a new investor in Opel, one person said.

Faced with plunging orders, merchants across recession-wracked Spain are starting to do something that many of them have never done: cut retail prices. Prices dipped everywhere, from restaurants and fashion retailers to pharmacies and supermarkets in March, The New York Times reported. The nation’s jobless rate, already a painful 15.5 percent, could soon reach 20 percent, a troubling number for a major industrialized country.

Fiat's chief executive has returned to the United States for talks as pressure builds to seal a partnership deal with Chrysler before the end of the month, sources at the Italian car maker said on Monday. Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne is going to Detroit and Washington, where the government has given Fiat and Chrysler an April 30 deadline to get the U.S. car maker's unions and bondholders to agree the deal, the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The bank has installed a receiver over Thedforde Trading in an effort to secure about €20 million it lent to the firm, The Sunday Business Post reported. Thedforde Trading is controlled by Simon Kelly, the son of Dublin property developer Paddy Kelly. Thedforde Trading has been trying to redevelop the premises into shops and a hotel, and had lodged a number of planning applications. It recently received planning permission for a part of the proposed development. Thedforde is the latest in a series of companies controlled by the Kelly family to be seized by banks.

Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev said his Blue Wings AG airline in Germany is planning to file for bankruptcy after the discount carrier’s flight license was revoked, Bloomberg reported. “I will probably file for bankruptcy and will try to make a point that it is the German government’s fault,” Lebedev said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

Austria is not on the brink of default and can cope with any risks caused by the exposure of domestic banks to emerging Europe, Austrian officials said. Austrian banks are among the biggest lenders to formerly Communist areas of central and eastern Europe and have lent the equivalent of 75 percent of its gross domestic product to clients in the region, Forbes reported. 'The creditworthiness of the state of Austria and of the Austrian banking sector is beyond any doubt,' Austrian National Bank Governor Ewald Nowotny said in a statement late on Tuesday.

German department store chain DWW Woolworth GmbH Co, owned by British investor Argyll Partners, has filed for insolvency, a court said on Tuesday. Slowing sales, increased competition, and insufficient liquidity are believed to have contributed to the company's collapse, Sky News reported. Business at its roughly German and Austrian stores would continue as usual, with the Austrian and logistics operations not believed to affected by the filing. Woolworth employs about 9,000 staff in Germany and generated about €900 million ($1.2 billion) in sales in its fiscal year to end-October 2008.

An Opel spokesman reacted to a New York Times newspaper report on Monday, which said US big-three carmaker GM may undergo what it called a "surgical" bankruptcy as early as June 1, Deutsche Welle reported. An Opel spokesman told dpa press agency that Opel wasn't worried about the effects of "a possible bankruptcy in terms of the measures taken up to now and business development." Carl-Peter Forster, the head of GM Europe, also said a possible bankruptcy at GM posed no danger to Opel. "Our production and the sale of cars in Europe won't be affected," he said.

Leveraged buyouts may help push corporate defaults in Europe to a record 14.7 percent this year, according to Standard & Poor’s. Between 90 and 112 speculative-grade companies in western Europe rated by S&P may default this year, the New York-based firm said in a report today, increasing an earlier estimate of as much as 11.1 percent. Defaults will be “materially higher” among companies purchased in LBOs, where target firms are loaded with acquisition debt, S&P said.

The ripple effects of American International Group Inc.'s woes have spread from the bastions of global finance to U.S. transit authorities to little towns throughout Germany, The Wall Street Journal reported. The reach can be chalked up in part to a kind of infrastructure tax deal that gained popularity in the 1990s and spread among hundreds of municipal and state governments around the world. Now, the deals in many cases have backfired because of the giant insurer's problems. The notion was this: Localities could earn millions of dollars selling their infrastructure to U.S.