Headlines

Italian lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena BMPS.MI +6.26% SpA approved on Monday the guidelines of a tougher restructuring plan aimed at obtaining the European Commission's green light on a state loan it received in February, and at restoring profitability by 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported. The new plan, which amends a set of targets and actions launched in June 2012, contains more drastic measures which the bank hopes will also enable it to reimburse €3 billion ($4 billion), or about 70%, of the state loan by 2014.

Redbank Power Station, the 151-megawatt coal-fired power station in New South Wales' Hunter Valley, has gone into receivership after negotiations on restructuring its $192.7 million of debt broke down as Redbank’s cash flow couldn’t meet its creditors' repayment schedule, the Business Spectator reported. Creditors have been in discussion with Redbank since 2010. “The operation of the power station will continue as normal,” a statement said.

More than 100 smaller firms in South Korea could face debt restructuring this year on consecutive defaults by some large enterprises, the highest tally since the 2008 global financial turmoil, sources from creditor banks said Monday, the Yonhap News Agency reported. The Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) and creditor banks are in the final stage of drawing up a list of corporate debtors from 1,100 small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which owe banks loans worth no more than 50 billion won (US$46.7 million), the FSS and bank officials with knowledge in the matter said.

OGX Petroleo & Gas Participacoes SA, the oil company controlled by former billionaire Eike Batista, is considering filing for bankruptcy protection in about a month, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter, Bloomberg reported. The filing would be done in Rio de Janeiro, said the people, asking not to be identified as discussions are private. While Batista is negotiating with creditors to avoid the same process for shipbuilder OSX Brasil SA, the most likely outcome is that both companies will seek legal protection, they said.

Britons are benefiting from efforts to mop up a scandal in which banks improperly sold customers tens of billions of pounds of insurance and other financial products over two decades, The Wall Street Journal reported. Although the government has been forcing banks to compensate aggrieved customers for two years already, new claims are still coming in, and at an even-faster clip. That, in turn, has provided a bit of a boost for the moribund British economy, creating tens of thousands of new jobs to handle the claims and putting more cash in people's pockets. U.K.

The Cypriot government, forced to impose capital controls as part of a 10 billion-euro ($13.6 billion) international aid program, may struggle to find a way to remove them, the country’s former finance minister said, Bloomberg reported. In March, Cyprus’s euro-area partners and the International Monetary Fund granted Cyprus the bailout in exchange for measures including a tax on bank deposits aimed at shrinking the Mediterranean island’s banking industry.

The euro zone can be separated into two groups, at least in terms of unemployment: Germany and the rest, the International Herald Tribune reported. In August, 1.9 million German adults — defined as people at least 25 years old — were counted as unemployed, meaning they were looking for work but had not found it. That figure is the lowest number since 1991, not long after the country was unified. In the rest of the euro zone, there were 13.9 million unemployed adults. That is the highest number since the euro was created in 1999.

Telecom Italia's new chief executive Marco Patuano will unveil a business plan outlining the future of its South American units and a possible corporate restructuring in Italy at a board meeting on November 7, trade union officials said, Reuters reported. Patuano told a meeting with unions on Friday the heavily indebted former phone monopoly had put on hold a plan to spin off its fixed-line network because the right regulatory conditions were not in place, they said in a joint statement.

There has been no letup in the number of companies seeking debt recast with the Corporate Debt Restructuring (CDR) Cell in the July-September quarter, The Hindu Business Line reported. Tighter norms prescribed by lenders have not deterred companies from going in for CDR, as they are unable to service their debt. Weighing the companies down are slack demand, policy logjam coming in the way of project implementation and shortage of raw materials.

Russia’s government is temporarily seizing $7.6 billion in savings from non-state pension funds while it carries out inspections, a move critics say looks like a “confiscation” aimed at plugging a hole in next year’s state budget, The Wall Street Journal Emerging Europe blog reported. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told ministers Thursday that the government needs to check that the money Russians channel to private pension funds is safe. To do this, it will seize 244 billion rubles ($7.6 billion) from non-state pension funds and put them into the state pension fund.