France

French President Francois Hollande's plan to lower the minimum retirement age to 60 from 62 is fully financed through higher payroll charges, the government said. The cost in the first full year is €1.1 billion, peaking at €3 billion in 2017, the government's spokeswoman, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, said after the weekly Cabinet meeting, the Irish Times reported. The change, which takes effect on November 1st and involves those who started work as teenagers, will add no more than 110,000 people a year to the retirement rolls, the government said in a statement.

European Union and French officials squared off against Germany on Monday over how best to help Spain’s ailing banks, drawing lines in the debate over the latest challenge to the euro zone, the International Herald Tribune reported. Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, and Pierre Moscovici, the French finance minister, offered cautious endorsement at a news conference in Brussels for the idea of letting Europe’s bailout funds inject money directly into troubled banks.

Debt-burdened French poultry group Doux collapsed into administration on Friday after failing to reach an agreement with bankers, putting at risk more than 3,000 jobs, Reuters reported. "A judicial administrator has been selected who will help the company's management to draw up a plan to keep operating, in France, that will support jobs and the survival of the company," Doux, one of the world's largest poultry exporters, said in a statement. "The Doux Group will immediately put together a plan to help strategic suppliers and breeders so that they do not experience any difficulty," it said.

Struggling lender Dexia SA said it is in exclusive talks to sell its Turkish Denizbank AS unit to Russia's biggest bank, OAO Sberbank, as the Belgian-French bank continues to sell assets to shore up its balance sheet, The Wall Street Journal reported. No financial information was disclosed, but a person familiar with the talks said a deal could be worth between $3 billion and $4 billion and be "the biggest in Sberbank's history." The details are to be ironed out in the next two weeks, the person added. State-controlled Sberbank is Russia's oldest and largest bank.

Germany dismissed a French-led call for euro zone governments to issue common bonds, a day before a European Union summit which investors are looking to for new measures to counter the bloc’s debt crisis, the Vancouver Sun reported. After a torrid week, stock markets rallied on optimism that the Wednesday summit would produce measures to foster growth and ward off the threat of contagion should Greece exit the euro.

France's Francois Hollande will push a proposal for mutualising European debt at an informal summit of EU leaders in Brussels this week, increasing pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to drop her opposition to the idea, Reuters reported. The new French president raised the idea of bonds jointly underwritten by all euro zone member states during G8 talks at the weekend and intends to raise it again when EU leaders meet on May 23, even if it goes against Merkel's wishes.

As presidential rivals debated the roots of unemployment during the recent campaign, many companies held off on announcing job cuts to avoid inflaming an already fraught political issue. But now that voters have chosen Socialist François Hollande over center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy to be their next president starting on Tuesday, labor unions say many large French companies are preparing to announce large layoffs in the weeks and months ahead, The Wall Street Journal reported.

After a strong rally at the beginning of the year, French bank shares are back in the doldrums, Dow Jones reported. Despite launching major restructuring plans, bolstering the capital buffers regulators say are needed to absorb possible future losses, slashing their enormous balance sheets, reducing their risk exposure and lowering their funding needs, their shares are once again languishing close to last summer's painful lows.

While French President Nicholas Sarkozy paints Socialist challenger Francois Hollande as a threat to the stable euro and France's fiscal discipline, such as it is, economic reality will set a similar course for whomever wins the presidency, Reuters reported in an analysis. The political rhetoric has aimed to magnify the gap between their economic programmes, but it broadly boils down to a timing difference; conservative Sarkozy has committed to balancing the budget in 2016, while Hollande, who leads polls by as much as 10 percentage points for the May 6 runoff, has set a 2017 deadline.

Dexia, the bailed-out Franco-Belgian lender, said on Wednesday it was looking into a severance package granted to former chairman Pierre Richard, forced to resign after the group's initial rescue, Reuters reported. The French government, which injected 3 billion euros ($3.94 billion) into Dexia's 2008 rescue alongside 3.4 billion from Belgium and Luxembourg, earlier this year asked the bank to examine how it could recover funds paid to the former chairman as part of his exit package. Newspaper Le Monde reported that Dexia's board had mandated a labour law specialist to look into the case.