Headlines

While Spanish manufacturing and services expanded in August for the first time in more than two years, falling bank lending threatens small companies in a country where only 2 percent of businesses employ more than 20 people. That is overshadowing the recovery Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy forecasts after a two-year recession, Bloomberg reported. “Spanish companies are most often small family-run operations,” said Nathalie Gianese, director of studies at Informa D&B, the research arm of Spanish risk insurer CESCE S.A.

Windreich AG, Germany's largest developer of offshore wind farms, has filed for insolvency and its chief executive has stepped down after financing talks for a 400 megawatt (MW) project stalled. The company made its filing with a German court late last week and now its CEO Willi Balz, who also owns the group, has resigned effective immediately, Windreich said in a statement late on Monday. "In talks with our investors it became clear that a change in management was a prerequisite for the successful continuation of talks," Windreich's new chief Werner Heer said.

The Minister for Finance has said that the publicity aspect of the new personal insolvency service may dissuade some applicants, but is still confident of its success, the Irish Times reported. Michael Noonan was responding to questions about the Insolvency Service of Ireland which has begun taking applications today from people who want to restructure their debts. The development means that in some cases people will be able to get some of their borrowings written off if creditors agree to deals. However, people who avail of the service will have their names published on a register.

Cyprus is having its worst economic downturn since the 1970s and that's bad news not only for Cypriots but also for Germans and other eurozone members, United Press International reported. Fears over what German taxpayers may have to do next to bail out Greece are already an election issue as German Chancellor Angela Merkel seeks a third term in Berlin's Bundestag parliament elections Sept. 22. Greek and Cypriot economies are so interlinked that Greek economic troubles are seen behind the crisis that forced Cyprus to seek EU help in return for a crushing austerity program.

The spouse of a bankrupt individual may need to buy their partner’s share of the family home in order to remain in the property, it was explained yesterday, the Irish Times reported. Chris Lehane, the State-appointed official in charge of the Insolvency Service of Ireland, was speaking to RTÉ news ahead of the new service which will start taking applications next week. Mr Lehane, the official assignee of bankruptcy, is the court-appointed official whose role is to assist bankrupts in their obligations to their creditors.

Italy and the European Commission have agreed that Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena will have to carry out a larger-than-expected capital hike, cut costs and reduce its large government bond holdings in order to win a EU green light for state aid, officials said on Saturday. Rome has offered 4.1 billion euros of state loans to Monte Paschi, Italy's No.3 bank, in order to prop the lender, which has a weak capital position following a derivatives scandal and big Italian bond investments.

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras of Greece seized on new economic data on Saturday that indicated the country was on track to economic recovery and promised relief to Greeks weary of years of punishing austerity, the International Herald Tribune reported. “Greece is turning the page,” Mr. Samaras told politicians and entrepreneurs at an annual international trade fair in the northern port of Thessaloniki, traditionally used by Greek prime ministers to outline their government’s economic policy for the coming year. “There will be no more austerity measures,” he said.

Leaders of the world’s largest economies ratcheted up the pressure on tax avoidance by backing “an ambitious and comprehensive” plan to crack down on multinationals that shift profits into low-tax countries, the Irish Times reported. The G20 countries also stepped up the assault on evasion, with plans to exchange tax information automatically between themselves by the end of 2015 and calling “on all other jurisdictions to join us by the earliest possible date”.

Britain’s unemployment rate was probably unchanged in July as the building economic recovery takes time to filter through to payrolls, Bloomberg reported. The rate based on an International Labour Organization method was 7.8 percent in the three months through July, according to the median of 28 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. Jobless claims probably dropped in August, according to a separate poll.

Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista will ask creditors of his debt-strapped oil company OGX to become shareholders and inject new cash, in a last ditch attempt to avoid seeking bankruptcy protection, Folha de S.Paulo newspaper said on Thursday. The plan will be presented to bondholders of OGX Petróleo e Gás Participações SA next Tuesday in New York, Folha said, citing five people involved in the negotiations. However, an OGX spokeswoman told Reuters it was not true that the company had scheduled a meeting with bondholders for next week.