Germany

German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG said Tuesday it has bought real estate and manufacturing facilities once owned by its former Qimonda unit for EUR100.6 million and also raised its capital expenditure budget for the current fiscal year, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The purchase covers cleanroom and manufacturing facilities in the German city of Dresden as well as 300-millimeter manufacturing equipment and is part of the company's strategic capacity expansion, Infineon said in a statement. Qimonda, a maker of DRAM chips, filed for insolvency in 2009.

Government officials from France and Germany went out of their way Monday to stress the need for a unified euro zone even as intensifying worries over Greek debt piled pressure on the currency bloc, The Wall Street Journal reported. In a Europe Day speech, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon on Monday said it's paramount that euro-zone states continue to show solidarity towards one another—signaling France could agree to go further to help Greece meet its funding needs for next year.

Germany's WestLB is being given another deadline, until the end of June, to submit details of a restructuring plan to the European Commission, three persons close to the matter told Dow Jones Wednesday. The German government was informed by the Commission of the new deadline in writing over the weekend, they said. In mid-April WestLB owners and the German government delivered a plan to turn WestLB into a bank providing central banking services to savings banks in the region, known as a Verbundbank.

The Bundesbank’s new hawkish president Jens Weidmann said private investors should help cover costs of the euro zone crisis, the Irish Times reported. Mr Weidmann promised a continued “stability culture” at the German central bank after taking over yesterday from outgoing president Axel Weber. “To put the currency union back on a solid footing, the rules have to be formulated so that national finance (players) and private investors are, in principle, prepared to answer for the consequences of their decision,” said Dr Weidmann, an economist and former student of Prof Weber.

The US Justice Department sued German giant Deutsche Bank Tuesday for more than $1 billion for mortgage fraud, saying the bank illegally obtained government insurance for substandard mortgages during the US housing boom, Agence France-Presse reported. Deutsche Bank and its subsidiary MortgageIT "repeatedly lied to be included in a government program to select mortgages for insurance by the government," the Justice Department complaint said.

In an interview with the left-leaning German daily Die Tageszeitung published Thursday, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, described Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann as "one of the most dangerous bankers in the world," Spiegel Online reported. Johnson singled out Ackermann's famous target of a 25 percent pretax return on equity for particular criticism. He said such returns were only possible because Ackermann knows that Deutsche Bank is too big to fail and that it would be "rescued by taxpayers" if it was faced with bankruptcy.

WestLB's owners and management are still working on three plans for the troubled German lender, two people familiar with the matter told Dow Jones Tuesday. The three options that owners and management are working on are a complete sale of the bank, downsizing the bank by 30% and transforming WestLB into a bank focusing on the Verbund business, which provides central banking services to the region's savings banks, the people said. More detailed plans for all three proposals will be handed in to the European competition authority on Friday.

Two of Germany's public-sector lenders are expected to fail European "stress tests" if they can't find a way around new regulations prohibiting inclusion of some non-voting government stakes in their core capital ratios, The Wall Street Journal reported. NordLB and Helaba were among the rare German banks that survived the financial crisis without any state aid. However, both banks are dangerously low on capital when their silent participations, a special type of subordinated debt that makes up as much as half of the banks' capital, is discounted.

German state-controlled lender Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, or LBBW, will likely kick off the sale of its German residential property portfolio worth about EUR1.3 billion ($1.8 billion) this summer, a spokesman for the bank said, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The LBBW spokesman said the bank "is preparing the sale of LBBW Immobilien's residential real estate, as required by the EU." However, a final decision over the details of the sale "will likely take until the summer of 2011," considering legal aspects and the complexity of the issue involved, the LBBW spokesman said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel Thursday said she would seek to secure an agreement for Germany to spread its contributions to the euro zone's permanent bailout fund over five years instead of the three- to four-year timeline European Union leaders had been discussing, The Wall Street Journal reported. Germany had agreed, at a meeting of finance ministers in Brussels on Monday, to make €22 billion ($31.03 billion) in total contributions to a permanent bailout fund that would take effect in 2013, Mrs.