Finland

Finnish miner Talvivaara, hurt by falling nickel prices and production problems, said it would seek a court-supervised overhaul after failing to raise funds and might face bankruptcy if the reorganisation failed, Reuters reported. Friday's announcement, which sent Talvivaara shares down 43 percent to a record low, was made after the group failed to raise more cash from investors including Finnish state investment fund Solidium, which decided additional investment was not viable.

Russia's mining giant Norilsk Nickel has no plans to help bail out financially-troubled Finnish nickel miner Talvivaara, a source familiar with the Russian company's plans said, Reuters reported. Talvivaara said earlier on Thursday it was in talks with stakeholders to secure funds after a series of production disruptions at its Sotkamo mine and a fall in nickel prices put it at risk of bankruptcy. Norilsk Nickel, the world's biggest nickel and palladium producer, is Talvivaara's main customer and owns a 0.64 percent stake in the company.

Tiimari Oyj, a Finnish retailer that sells stationery and craft materials, filed for bankruptcy protection after failing to find funding, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Tiimari wasn’t able to secure enough financing to stay in business, the Vantaa, Finland-based company said in a statement to the Helsinki stock exchange today. The shares were halted at 0.07 euros at 4:17 p.m. yesterday in the Finnish capital pending an announcement from the company.

The Finnish paper company Stora Enso Oyj agreed to pay $8 million to end a nearly nine-year-old antitrust lawsuit accusing a former unit of conspiring to fix prices for purchasers of coated paper used in magazines and catalogs, Reuters reported. According to a filing on Monday with the U.S. District Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the settlement resolves claims against Stora Enso and the former Stora Enso North America Corp unit, which was sold in 2007 and is now known as NewPage Wisconsin System Inc after going through bankruptcy.

Finland's central bank delivered a stark warning Tuesday that the prolonged euro crisis is beginning to drag the country into the same financial troubles that the Southern Europeans it helped bail out are mired in, The Wall Street Journal reported. Weighed down by weak demand for exports and a decrease in private consumption, Finland's gross domestic product is likely to shrink 0.8% this year, the Bank of Finland said in its biannual economic outlook. That would mark a second-straight annual contraction.

Finland, one of the eurozone’s most ardent defenders of austerity, has entered its third technical recession since the start of the financial crisis, the Financial Times reported. The Nordic country’s economy shrank by 0.1 per cent in the first quarter compared with the previous three months and by 2.1 per cent versus a year earlier. Following revisions to earlier data, it emerged that Finland has been in recession for a year.

The Finnish parliament would find it all but impossible to approve any changes to the latest Greek bailout, according to senior politicians in Helsinki, the Financial Times reported. Leading figures in the two main parties in the six-party coalition government said that if Greece was given more time to cut its deficit it would impose additional costs on Finland, making parliamentary approval “very difficult”.

The surge in anti-European sentiment before the election in Finland last year may have quietened down, but promises to limit the country's exposure to weaker economies are continuing to have a big impact on how the eurozone tackles its sovereign debt crisis, the Financial Times reported. Finland rattled the bond markets last week after it threatened to block an agreement to use Europe's €500bn permanent rescue fund to start buying Italian and Spanish bonds in the secondary markets.

Finland and the Netherlands, the euro zone's most hardline creditor states, cast the first doubts on Monday on a European summit deal designed to save Spain and Italy from being engulfed by the currency bloc's debt crisis, Reuters reported. The Finnish government told parliament that Helsinki and its Dutch allies would block the euro zone's permanent bailout fund buying bonds in secondary markets. Euro zone leaders agreed last Friday that rescue funds could be used in a "flexible and efficient manner" to lower government borrowing costs. Their statement gave no further detail.

Finnish unemployment rose to the highest in six months at the end of last year, increasing more than economists estimated, as Europe's debt crisis sapped economic growth in the northernmost euro member, the Irish Times reported on a Bloomberg story. The jobless rate, which isn't adjusted for seasonal variations, rose to 7.4 per cent in December from 6.2 per cent in November, Statistics Finland said Tuesday. The rate topped all four economist estimates in a survey by Bloomberg.