Headlines

Even in a record year for Spanish bankruptcies, the filing by Pescanova, a household local name that farms, catches and processes fish, stands out not just for scale, but for the opaque culture and boardroom dysfunction it has revealed, Reuters reported in an insight. The April 15 insolvency filing mentions debts of 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion), but financial sources who have had dealings with the company say total debt is probably more than double that amount, potentially making it the country's third-largest bankruptcy.

Unemployment in Spain and France has jumped to new highs, data showed Thursday, lending ammunition to a growing chorus calling for easing the euro zone's austerity drive as the cure for its debt crisis because of the high social fallout, The Wall Street Journal reported. The jobless rate in Spain rose sharply to 27.2% of the workforce in the first quarter, the highest level since records began in the 1970s. In France, the number of registered job seekers who are fully unemployed rose to more than 3.2 million, topping a previous record set in 1997.

For years, Slovenia cruised along unchallenged as a eurozone member before bond markets smelled trouble and started speculating that it could be the next bailout candidate, the Financial Times reported. With very low levels of sovereign and personal debt, and a boom in 2006-07 before the financial crisis, this picture postcard country of 2m people built a gleaming new road network and adopted the trappings of a well-to-do central European state.

A Spanish court accepted Spanish fishing company Pescanova's insolvency petition on Thursday and said it would name independent administrators to replace the board of directors, Reuters reported. "We declare Pescanova in insolvency," the Pontevedra mercantile court in northwestern Galicia said in a ruling published on Thursday. Galicia-based Pescanova, which catches, processes and packages fish, filed for insolvency this month on 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion) of debt and has yet to present audited 2012 accounts, missing a March 1 deadline.

Britain avoided slipping into its third recession in recent times during the first quarter of 2013, a rare bit of welcome economic news for the government, but it continues to struggle to deliver even modest sustainable growth, The Wall Street Journal reported. The U.K. government took a bold gamble on a program of government-spending cuts when it took office in 2010, but it has faced increasing criticism of its austerity program as the economy has stagnated.

Four years ago, Iceland's electorate—seeking a harbor from financial turmoil—voted in a government that said entry to the European Union and euro zone would offer protection from currency volatility, punishing inflation and the embarrassment of a failed economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. As the tiny Nordic nation prepares to hit the polls Saturday, the EU dream is wilting. Strong tourism and fishing, widening trade relationships and the fact that the crisis that brought down three Icelandic banks is getting cleaned up has fueled skepticism about the idea.

Investment banks are among the first and biggest beneficiaries of Japan’s new economic-stimulus policies, known as Abenomics. Since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came into office in December with a plan to end more than a decade of deflation, banks’ underwriting business for both equity and bonds is soaring. Companies have more than tripled sales of stocks to 1.7 trillion yen ($17 billion) so far this year compared with the same period in 2012, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Corporate bond issuances climbed to 3.1 trillion yen, the best start to a year since 2009, the data show.

Defying the conservative central government in Madrid, Andalusia this month implemented measures that will temporarily stop evictions and penalize banks and real-estate firms for holding hundreds of thousands of vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reported. It favors people hurt by Spain's recession over of the interests of the country's lenders, including many that have received government bailouts, The Wall Street Journal reported. Whether the action will stand up in court is still in question.

Portugal's government plans to lower company tax rates "significantly" as part of a wider plan of incentives to drag the economy out of its worst recession since the 1970s, economy minister Alvaro Santos Pereira said, the Irish Times reported. He also promised to step up the financing of the economy by state-owned bank CGD that will provide €1 billion euros this year and €2.5 billion in 2014, and later to create a development bank to boost such funding further, especially for exports-oriented small and medium-sized companies.

A recent court decision blocking cuts in wages and pensions for public employees in Portugal is forcing the government of one of Europe's most fragile economies to move beyond palliative measures and try to overhaul the underlying structure of an inefficient public sector, The Wall Street Journal reported.