Headlines

Portugal's central bank said late on Monday that if Banco Espirito Santo posts a loss larger than its existing capital cushion of 2.1 billion euros ($2.8 billion), a capital increase will be used to guarantee adequate solvency levels, Reuters reported. Earlier, Expresso newspaper's online edition said BES was likely to report a loss of around 3 billion euros on Wednesday after having to assume additional debt liabilities linked to the troubled Espirito Santo group of its founding family. BES officials were not immediately available to comment.

Europe’s banking union is set to face a challenge in Germany’s constitutional court, a development that threatens to generate renewed uncertainty over one of the main responses to the eurozone’s financial crisis, the Financial Times reported. Five German academics have filed a case claiming that the EU’s banking union is illegal under German law because it was created without the necessary treaty changes.

Ireland has “no chance” of securing a deal on its legacy bank debt, one of the most influential figures in German politics has told the Irish Times. Joachim Pfeiffer, who is the economic policy spokesman for the parliamentary group of the ruling Christian Democrats, said the euro zone’s new bailout fund had not been established for nor would be it used for retroactive bank recapitalisation. “There is no chance Ireland’s legacy assets will be paid by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Argentines are poised for a default on Wednesday – their third in just over three decades. The trigger would be a missed $539m interest payment after mediated talks between the government and a group of “holdout” creditors made no apparent progress last week. The growing prospect of default has begun to focus minds on what would come next. Economists broadly expect a recession in the country would deepen, inflation to rise and capital flight – possibly triggering a second devaluation of the peso this year.

China’s government is authorizing developer debt sales for the first time in five years in a bid to avoid bankruptcies as the property market cools, Bloomberg News reported. Jiangsu Future Land Co., a builder of homes in eastern China, sold 2 billion yuan ($323 million) of five-year AA rated bonds last week to yield 8.9 percent. That’s less than the average 9.73 percent on trust products that many developers relied on for financing after authorities stopped approving onshore note issuance in 2009.

Deutsche Bank AG and BNP Paribas SA, which hold almost half of the hard-to-value assets on the books of the euro area’s 10 biggest banks, are facing a reality check that could impose losses, Bloomberg News reported. As part of its review of 128 lenders, the European Central bank is studying less-actively traded loans and securitized products that banks value with minimal external data. The unprecedented scope of the exercise gives the ECB, which is taking on a supervisory role this year, insight that has eluded investors: comparing how the biggest investment banks value complex assets.

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office said on Friday that it would pay 3 million pounds, or about $5.1 million, to settle civil claims brought by a property developer following a flawed investigation into the collapse of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing during the financial crisis, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported.

Espírito Santo Financial Group SA, which holds 20% of Portuguese lender Banco Espírito Santo SA, has filed for creditor protection in Luxembourg, becoming the third company in the group to do so in less than two weeks, The Wall Street Journal reported. "Espírito Santo Financial Group SA has asked the Luxembourg courts for controlled management following the company's conclusion that it is unable to meet its obligations under its commercial paper program and obligations associated with the company's stand-alone debt obligations," it said in a statement.

A group of Chinese investors is in talks with the bankruptcy estate of Icelandic bank Islandsbanki, which was previously known as Glitnir and failed in 2008, over buying a stake in the up-for-sale bank, a finance ministry source said on Thursday. The source told Reuters that among the investors were Chinese bank ICBC, insurer China Life Insurance Company and a large Chinese private equity fund. Creditors own 95 percent of Islandsbanki through ISB Holding while the government owns 5 percent.

The loophole that allowed Irish banks not to disclose their property losses during the crash has finally been closed, the Irish Times reported. Under new international accounting rules, which will take effect in 2018, banks will be obliged to provision for souring loans much earlier. The Irish banking meltdown in 2008 on the back of the collapse of Lehman Bros in the US highlighted how little capital banks held to cover a slump in the value of the assets on their books, forcing the public to bail out many lenders.