Headlines

Shares in state-owned lender Bankia could slide another 30 percent despite a multi-billion-euro cash injection, analysts say, with little hope of a quick recovery as tough business conditions and a challenging restructuring plan weigh, Reuters reported. More than 11 billion shares issued as part of a 15.5-billion-euro ($20 billion) recapitalisation of the Spanish bank are to start trading on Tuesday at 0700 GMT in what was meant to be a new beginning after a 24-billion-euro bailout last year.

Big companies’ tax affairs in Europe are to be opened up to greater public scrutiny with the EU rushing out a law compelling them to reveal corporate profits and taxes on a country-by-country basis, the Financial Times reported. Amid a political furore over allegations of tax avoidance by corporate-giants such as Apple, Starbucks and Google, the EU is extending transparency reforms for banks and resources groups to all large public and private companies.

Slovenian lawmakers approved changes to the country’s insolvency legislation designed to accelerate corporate restructuring and aid the ailing banking industry, Bloomberg reported. Lawmakers voted for changes the government said will lower the debt burden at companies and spur an economic recovery, according to a live broadcast on public broadcaster TV Slovenija in the capital Ljubljana.

Ireland's new insolvency laws will help distressed home-loan borrowers, but also help Irish taxpayers regain some of the huge sums the country has pumped into its banks during the country's deep financial crisis, Irish central bank head Patrick Honohan said Thursday, Dow Jones Newswires reported. Dublin last month detailed a new so-called Insolvency Service of Ireland agency, the centerpiece of new debt-solution laws that the government says will help distressed borrowers strike deals with their banks.

A Spanish High Court judge has charged the former chairman of fishing firm Pescanova, Manuel Fernandez de Sousa, with falsifying information and insider trading, according to a court document published on Thursday, Reuters reported. Pescanova, one of the world's largest fishing firms, filed for insolvency in April and the dealings of Sousa, who sold a large stake in the firm in the months before the insolvency petition, have come under scrutiny.

Ireland’s 850 hotels have aggregate debts of €6.7 billion and about 300 of them are in financial difficulty. These are the key points of a report on the health of the sector jointly commissioned by AIB and the Irish Hotels Federation, the Irish Times reported. The report also found that 54 per cent of hotels increased their turnover in 2012, while two-thirds of the 111 respondents expect tourism to improve here within the next three years.

The International Monetary Fund may have been too optimistic in assessing the debt sustainability of some borrowing countries and could toughen loan conditions in an effort to make debt restructuring more successful, according to the fund’s staff, Bloomberg reported. Sovereign debt restructuring cases in recent years have often come “too little and too late,” IMF economists and legal experts wrote in a report published today.

Faced with public outrage over tax-evasion scandals at a time of austerity budgets, European leaders pledged Wednesday to ensure that everybody—from high rollers to big multinationals—pay their fair share to cash-strapped governments, The Wall Street Journal reported. But the small steps that leaders took at their Brussels summit underline how difficult it is to effectively fight tax evasion by individuals and tax avoidance by companies at a time when countries are also competing for foreign investment.

Local creditors of Wuxi Suntech, the bankrupt unit of Chinese solar panel maker Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd, on Wednesday claimed the subsidiary owed them a combined $2.5 billion, at the start of a debt restructuring process expected to last months. Wuxi Suntech, the biggest subsidiary of New York-listed Suntech Power, filed for bankruptcy protection in China in March, five days after its troubled parent company defaulted on a $541 million dollar convertible bond.

The rising number of bad loans – both mortgage loans and those to businesses – and the reconfiguring of the banks so that they can lend profitably to support growth are the two main challenges to the Irish economy, according to the Central Bank’s second annual Macro-Financial Review, the Irish Times reported. The report, which assesses the strengths and weaknesses of all areas of the Irish financial system, states that the greatest single risk to the domestic economy is “the health of banking system and its ability to support the real economy”.