Headlines

The Liepaja Court has a launched insolvency process against the financially-troubled metallurgical company Liepajas Metalurgs, reports LETA. The court has decided to halt the companies legal protection process and launch an insolvency process against it, The Baltic Times reported. Liepajas Metalurgs legal protection administrator, Haralds Velmers has been appointed the company's insolvency administrator. Velmers' insolvency petition was submitted to the court on Nov. 4.

Italian banks are still struggling with rising levels of bad loans, with smaller banks lagging in setting aside money to cover potential losses on them, even as the Bank of Italy urges a more aggressive cleanup on the financial institutions’ balance sheets ahead of a European health check next year, The Wall Street Journal reported. Third-quarter results of Italy’s banks reflect the pain they are still experiencing as Italy’s economy struggles to revive after two years of recession.

Germany's insolvent Hess said on Wednesday auditors found the street light maker's financial accounts for 2007 through 2012 overstated pretax profit by a total of nearly 45 million euros ($60.5 million), Reuters reported. Hess filed for insolvency in February, only months after making its stock market debut, saying a fraud investigation had scuppered its chances of raising urgently-needed funds. It said damages would now have paid to investors, who bought shares in the company based on false accounts.

Creditors of the main unit of Chinese solar panel maker Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd on Tuesday approved a plan to restructure its $1.75 billion debts with proceeds from acquirer Hong Kong-listed Shunfeng Photovoltaic International Ltd., Reuters reported. Shunfeng announced this month it had agreed to take over indebted Wuxi Suntech Power Co Ltd for 3 billion yuan ($493 million), pending approvals from various parties including its own shareholders and Wuxi Suntech's creditors on the debt restructuring. Shunfeng has said it would use the proceeds to pay down Wuxi Suntech's debts.

Global investment banks could face almost $100 billion in civil settlements from investigations into interest-rate and foreign-exchange manipulations, analysts at Stifel Financial Corp.’s KBW unit said, Bloomberg reported. Probes of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, could cost $46 billion and currency trading inquiries could trigger another $26 billion, analysts led by Andrew Stimpson said today in a note. That’s in addition to settling claims over faulty mortgages with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which could be $24 billion, the analysts wrote.

Heads of state from 24 European countries gathered Tuesday to address an increasingly visible scar from the region's debt crisis: almost a quarter of young Europeans are unemployed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Leaders meeting in Paris aren't expected to come up with any new Europe-wide policies. Rather, they will review pledges already made and compare measures taken on national levels. In particular, they are looking at how to deliver on an EU pledge to propose employment or training to young people without a job, French officials said.

The National Asset Management Agency has put a London-based property company controlled by former Howard Holdings executives into receivership, according to court records in London, the Irish Times reported. The company, Wandle Holdings – which has 30 outstanding Anglo Irish Bank mortgages – is registered to an address at Hambalt Road, Lambeth in London, according to Companies House files. The administrative receiver to the company, Belfast-based John Hansen, was appointed on October 17th, though he will have to spend the next month or so investigating the company’s affairs.

The president of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., one of Japan's biggest financial institutions, said his company has extended an unspecified number of "suspicious loans" to people with ties to organized crime, the latest in a series of firms to make such an admission since a scandal in September over a similar disclosure by a rival, Mizuho Bank Ltd., The Wall Street Journal reported.

New Zealand's dairy sector is still highly indebted and vulnerable to a fall in record high commodity prices and rising interest rates, according to the Reserve Bank, The New Zealand Herald reported. High levels of agricultural debt, which is heavily concentrated in the dairy sector, poses a risk to the stability of the financial system, deputy governor Grant Spencer said at today's release of the central bank's six-monthly financial stability report.

OSX Brasil SA, the ship building company of troubled tycoon Eike Batista, filed for bankruptcy protection, the second such filing for a commodities empire that crumbled this year as losses piled up and investor confidence plummeted, The Wall Street Journal reported. "Parts of Mr. Batista´s empire were a house of cards, and now they are falling," said Guilherme Figueiredo, a fund manager at M.Safra & Co. in Sao Paulo who helps oversee $1.97 billion in assets. The move Monday at a Rio de Janeiro court follows a default and bankruptcy filing last month for Mr.