France’s socialist government has hinted that a replacement for its controversial 75 per cent income tax bracket, struck down late last month by the country’s constitutional council, may be at a lower rate but imposed for the rest of its five-year mandate, not just two years as previously proposed, the Financial Times reported. It is also to divert €2bn in extra funds into state-backed job creation schemes in a bid to meet President François Hollande’s bold promise to reverse a trend of fast-rising unemployment by the end of this year.

The government of Socialist President François Hollande on Sunday said that it would consider other ways of imposing a top income-tax rate of 75 percent on high-wealth individuals after the country's top constitutional authority scrapped the plan, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The constitutional watchdog did not reject the principle of a more-stringent tax regime, but rather the way it would have been applied.

Ailing Franco-Belgian lender Dexia SA received the green light from European Union regulators for a restructuring plan that will see large parts of the bank closed, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move will help bring to a close a long-running probe into Dexia, one of Europe's first casualties of the financial crisis, which last month received its third government bailout in four years. European Commission antitrust chief Joaquín Almunia said he expected to give final approval for the restructuring measures on Dec. 28.

Iranian group Tadbir Energy will submit a bid for the Petit-Couronne oil refinery from insolvent owner Petroplus at a court hearing on Tuesday, French daily Le Figaro said, without citing its sources. Tadbir Energy, a unit of the Imam Khomeini foundation, will offer to buy France's oldest refinery with a guarantee to keep the 550 staff it employs, the paper added. Iranian oil imports are forbidden since July in the European Union, the paper said.

After six months keeping the world guessing about whether he had a vision for fixing France's sickly economy, President Francois Hollande has unveiled a battle plan "à la française" to ease companies' labour costs and trim public spending. But the softly-softly pace of adjustment may be too slow to satisfy financial markets after Moody's on Monday became the second credit ratings agency to strip Paris of its AAA rating, citing both a loss of competitiveness and low growth, Reuters reported in an analysis.

France suffered the second downgrade of its sovereign debt rating this year when Moody’s, the US rating agency, removed its triple A ranking on Monday night, the Financial Times reported. It followed a similar move in January by Standard & Poor’s and underscored concerns that the country’s high level of public debt, which has risen above 90 per cent of gross national product, put it in danger of becoming another victim of the eurozone debt crisis. The move will pose a serious test for François Hollande’s socialist administration, in office for only six months.

France and Belgium Thursday agreed to inject a further €5.5 billion ($7 billion) into Dexia SA, putting one of the first European banking casualties of the 2008 financial crisis almost entirely in state hands and adding to the burden of cutting government debt and deficits amid the euro-zone recession, The Wall Street Journal reported. France agreed in the wee hours of the European morning to provide €2.59 billion and Belgium €2.92 billion in exchange for preference shares.

France's government has promised €20 billion ($25 billion) in tax credits to businesses as part of a "competitiveness pact" that it hopes will spark innovation and lower unemployment - but falls short of calls in a recent report for a "shock" to the economy, the Associated Press reported. The announcement of the plan Tuesday came a day after a government-commissioned report — by Louis Gallois, former head of Airbus parent EADS — said the country's ailing economy needed a big kick to stay globally competitive.

Netoil Inc., a Dubai-based company, has submitted a revised offer for insolvent Petroplus Holdings AG’s Petit-Couronne refinery in Normandy, France, teaming up with BP Plc., Bloomberg Businessweek reported. “We didn’t have a supplier before, now, we have a letter of intent from BP to supply 120,000 barrels of crude a day to the refinery for a three-year period,” Roger Tamraz, Netoil’s chairman, said today in a telephone interview from Paris.

The European Union summit that ended Friday suggested Germany and France, always awkward partners in managing the three-year-old euro crisis, are increasingly at odds over how to resolve it, The Wall Street Journal reported. The summit produced a tortuous compromise between the currency bloc's two biggest nations over the creation of a new euro-zone banking supervisor, but it also brought simmering disagreements between Berlin and Paris into the open.