Solar Millennium, which has its U.S. headquarters in downtown Oakland,, Calif., filed for insolvency in a German court, the Oakland Tribune reported today. In May, Solar Millennium said it was awarded a $2.1 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. The money would have been used to underpin the company's construction of a solar energy complex in the California desert community of Blythe, using its solar trough technology. However, Solar Millennium on Aug. 18 abandoned its focus on the cutting-edge technology that was the basis for the loan guarantee.

The European Commission Tuesday approved a plan to split up German state-controlled lender Westdeutsche Landesbank, or WestLB, leading to a change in ownership, an eventual winding down of its banking activities and the disappearance of a once prestigious name, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The plan, submitted by the bank's owners---the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and regional savings banks---and Germany's federal government at the end of June, "is in line with EU state aid rules," the commission said.

Solon SE’s insolvency, the first of a publicly traded solar company in Germany, won’t affect its units in Italy, France and the U.S., Bloomberg Businessweek reported. The insolvency is for now confined to the holding company and its German units with 532 of a total 800 employees, said Moeller PR, which represents the administrator Ruediger Wienberg of law firm HWW Wienberg Wilhelm. Wienberg will contact customers and suppliers to maintain production and order processing, it said. Wages are secured through February.

The insolvency administrator of Germany's Manroland is still scouting around for parties potentially interested in buying or investing in the world's second biggest printing machinery maker, a German daily said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. "There are other candidates who are better but there are not many of them," administrator Werner Schneider said in a prereleased version of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's Wednesday edition. Schneider said he had therefore mandated investment bank Lazard to assist in the search for potential candidates.

A day ahead of a crucial gathering of European Union leaders in Brussels, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have outlined their plan for solving the euro crisis through deeper fiscal integration, The Wall Street Journal Euro Crisis blog reported. In an open letter to European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Merkel issued an ultimatum to the 27 EU governments, saying they must decide whether they will accept greater central control over their national budgets.

If Commerzbank CEO Martin Blessing could make one wish, he would presumably ask for a few billion euros, or that someone would take the bank's ailing subsidiary Eurohypo off his hands, or that the entire sovereign debt crisis would simply disappear, Spiegel Online reported. But banks, along with their managers and owners, are not allowed to pin their hopes on miracles. They need money, as quickly as possible.

Seeking to restore confidence in the euro, the leaders of France and Germany jointly called on Monday for changes to the European Union treaty so that countries using the euro would face automatic penalties if budget deficits ran too high, the Los Angeles Times reported. But not everyone on Wall Street was reassured that Europe would get control of its 2-year-old debt crisis. Stock prices rose and borrowing costs for European governments dropped sharply in response to the changes proposed by French President Nikolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Manroland AG, the German printing- press maker that’s majority owned by Allianz SE, filed for insolvency, in the country’s biggest corporate failure since retailer Arcandor AG collapsed two years ago, Bloomberg reported. Manroland filed to open insolvency proceedings with the district court in Augsburg, Germany, court spokesman Alfred Schwarz said. Werner Schneider was appointed as insolvency administrator, said the Offenbach-based company, which employs 6,500 workers worldwide, mainly in Germany.

The European Central Bank and Germany firmly rejected calls from euro-zone politicians to bail out Italy and other struggling euro members by intervening massively in bond markets, insisting that the central bank's credibility rests on its political independence and focus on fighting inflation, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The row between France and Germany over whether to use the European Central Bank to rescue the eurozone has intensified, further shattering international confidence that a solution can be found to the escalating debt crisis, The Guardian reported. On a day when the US president, Barack Obama, accused the eurozone of suffering from a "problem of political will", Paris and Berlin clashed over whether the ECB should be called on to do more to bail out countries that are struggling to borrow.