Germany

The International Monetary Fund Monday urged Germany to step up investment and accelerate structural reforms to boost its growth prospects and alleviate the negative effects of a rapidly aging society, The Wall Street Journal reported. “More progress on structural reforms would revitalize potential growth and enhance the authorities’ leadership at the European level in this area,” the Washington-based fund said in a statement.

The euro zone is tying itself in knots over whether to limit banks' holdings of their own governments' bonds or to make them set aside more capital against home sovereign risk, Reuters reported in an analysis. Germany, the bloc's dominant power, has made such "risk reduction" measures, as it calls them, a prior condition before it will accept any further "risk sharing" in Europe's banking union through a common deposit insurance scheme.

Lenders to struggling German oil and gas safety tools producer Bartec are set to appoint a financial restructuring adviser by the beginning of next week, according to two sources close to the situation. Lenders held a beauty parade on Wednesday to appoint a restructuring adviser as they push for a bigger equity injection from the company's private equity-owner Charterhouse. Three firms - Houlihan Lokey, Deloitte and Macquarie - are in contention, with a successful party likely to be appointed by Monday May 9, the sources said.

Paymill, a one-stop solution which enables merchants to easily accept credit and debit cards, announced it made the decision to go for a preliminary insolvency in self-administration. With this decision, the German online payment provider hopes to bring the merger and acquisition negotiations to a successful result, Ecommerce News reported. There were already some rumors about Paymill filing for bankruptcy in the German media, but the online payment provider chose to share the news itself on the company’s blog.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Monday he is confident Greece and its creditors will agree on an assessment of the country’s bailout program, although he cast doubt on whether an agreement could be reached this week, The Wall Street Journal reported. Greece and its creditors—the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund—are in talks on the economic overhauls Athens must implement before the country can receive fresh loans. “We will be successful in the troika’s [bailout] review with Greece,” Mr.

Europe’s largest investment bank Deutsche Bank has emerged on the list of bidders this week for one of the National Asset Management Agency’s last big portfolio sales, the Irish Times reported. The Frankfurt-based bank joins a joint offer from Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs and CarVal, a US investor in distressed assets, on Nama’s sale of two portfolios which have a combined nominal value of €4.7 billion, according to sources. Others bidders include Lone Star and Cerberus.

German prosecutors said on Thursday they would press criminal charges against the family behind drugstore chain Schlecker, which folded four years ago, Reuters reported. The chain's founder, 71-year-old Anton Schlecker, is accused of having siphoned assets from the company on 36 occasions while in full knowledge of its looming bankruptcy, according to the prosecutors' office in the city of Stuttgart. It did not provide a figure on the sums involved, but a spokesman for the prosecutors said several million euros had been illegally diverted from funds available to repay creditors.

China is cutting back on mining machinery as its economy slips. The United Arab Emirates and other Middle Eastern countries are no longer awash in oil money, putting luxury car brands at risk. Russia, still facing Western sanctions, cannot buy as much high-tech energy equipment, the International New York Times reported. The downshift in the emerging markets is leaving Germany vulnerable — and, by extension, Europe.

EON, Germany’s largest utility, reported its biggest annual loss after writing down the value of its coal and gas-fired power plants by billions of euro. Its net loss more than doubled to €7 billion in 2015 from a year earlier, the company said. That was worse than the consensus figure among analysts for a €6.4 billion loss. Germany’s shift to renewable energy is hurting utilities as solar and wind plants get priority access to the grid, squeezing margins at traditional coal and gas-fired stations.

Europe’s largest economy is experiencing a best-of-times worst-of-times moment, with solid growth and its biggest budget surplus since unification overshadowed by growing jitters about the months ahead, the Irish Times reported. The federal statistics office released figures on Tuesday showing “solid and consistent” growth of 1.7 per cent last year and a combined € 19.4 billion surplus on all federal, state and local public budgets. “That is, in absolute terms, the highest since unification”, the statistics office said, around 0.6 per cent of overall economic output.