Headlines

IVG Immobilien AG (IVG), once Germany’s biggest real estate company, will be handed over to creditors after lenders approved a plan to restructure 3.2 billion euros ($4.4 billion) of debt, Bloomberg News reported. Creditors voted today in a court-supervised poll in favor of a debt-to-equity swap and capital increase that will take place in mid-2014, IVG said in a statement today. The company said on Feb. 24 that the swap will allow it to cut its debt by 2.2 billion euros.

Merrill Lynch told the government in 2008 the cost of bailing out the banks would only be a quarter of the €64 billion it eventually cost the taxpayer, the Irish Times reported. The information has been disclosed by Department of Finance documents released to Sinn Féin finance spokesman Pearse Doherty in recent days. In a 45-page presentation to the Department of Finance on November 18th, 2008, Merrill Lynch estimated it would cost some €16.4 billion to fund a State rescue of the banks.

In a vast warehouse in the small town of Trumau near Vienna, some of the remnants of Austria's biggest post-war bankruptcy are laid out in thousands of neatly arranged lots. A handful of potential buyers pick over the piles of drills, saws, cables, buckets and pumps that are being auctioned off to make a few million euros for the creditors of Alpine Bau, a former unit of Spanish construction group FCC, Reuters reported.

A U.S. judge who froze assets belonging to the American affiliate of bankrupt Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox Co. loosened that restraint to see where some of the digital currency flows, Bloomberg News reported. U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman in Chicago today revised his temporary order issued March 11 to allow movement -- and possibly tracking -- of small amounts of Bitcoin. Jay Edelson, a lawyer for Mt. Gox depositor Gregory Greene, told the judge today that he was “trying to find a pot of crypto-gold.” Greene sued the exchange and and its principal, Mark Karpeles, for fraud last month.

George Osborne on Wednesday unveiled the biggest pensions revolution for almost a century, in a Budget aimed at savers and the grey vote that sent shares in insurance companies into a tailspin, the Financial Times reported. The chancellor stunned the pensions industry by announcing plans to give people far more freedom to choose what they do with their pension pot, outlining plans to change rules which effectively force people to buy an annuity at retirement.

A denial by China's central bank that it is involved in emergency talks to bailout a troubled property developer reinforced signals Beijing is now more willing to let banks and other investors take losses on loans, Reuters reported. Media reports said the central bank was in talks with Zhejiang Xingrun Real Estate Co, which government officials have said is on the brink of bankruptcy. That led to financial market speculation the government could bail out the company. However, the reports "did not accord with reality", the People's Bank of China said in a post on China's Twitter-like Weibo.

More than £5bn in disputed tax liabilities will be dragged out of the bank accounts of tax avoiders and restored to Treasury coffers, the chancellor claimed. George Osborne hopes a tougher "pay now, argue later" approach to more than 30,000 of the richest and most sophisticated tax avoiders in Britain will help HM Revenue & Customs deal with its costly backlog of dispute cases, while generating revenues to fund measures announced elsewhere in the budget, The Guardian reported.

A group involved in brokering deals between banks and distressed mortgage holders has reported a sharp increase in activity, the Irish Times reported. The Irish Mortgage Holders’ Organisation (IMHO) said it had recently negotiated 97 deals involving customers of Allied Irish Banks that included some form of debt write-down. In one case, involving a couple in Cork, the bank had written off €195,000 in mortgage debt while allowing the couple and their two children to remain in the house. The deal is believed to be one of the largest mortgage write-downs agreed by the State-owned bank.

One of the Bank of Japan's more outspoken policy board members warned on Wednesday that too much monetary stimulus could cause problems for the economy in the future, even as the head of the bank said that it should stand ready to act again if needed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Board member Takahide Kiuchi, a former Nomura Securities economist, has been skeptical over the BOJ's ability to attain its 2% inflation target in two years and is wary of maintaining an ultra-easing monetary policy for an extended period.

Famed Italian automotive styling house Bertone has confirmed it has entered court bankruptcy proceedings after mounting debts forced it to send staff home. “The problem is many debts and very high costs. At the moment everything is blocked,” a spokesperson told The Telegraph. “People haven’t been coming to work for a month and a half now.” The fate of the Turin-based company will be known by the end of April, according to the spokesperson. A court will either declare that the company will close for good or reveal the name of the most suitable buyer.