Headlines

Teldat, a small Spanish designer and maker of internet routers for corporate use, is exactly the kind of company the eurozone needs to foster to recover from the debt crisis. With an annual turnover of €80m and 240 employees, the Madrid-based group sits squarely in the small and medium enterprise sector that policy makers say is critical to creating new jobs, the Financial Times reported. But Teldat and other small companies face disproportionately higher charges than their bigger rivals when they borrow money from banks.

Greece will extend a deadline for the recapitalisation of its banks by a few weeks, possibly until the end of May, Greek central bank chief George Provopoulos said on Monday. Greek banks, which are being recapitalised with funds from the country's latest EU/IMF bailout, have been lobbying for the terms of the recapitalisation scheme to be sweetened and also sought an extension to an end-April deadline for the plan. "There will be a small extension of a few weeks, it may be pushed to the end of May," Provopoulos told state TV.

The head of Cyprus’s central bank has sought to deflect blame for the chaos that has engulfed the island’s financial system but has promised a steady lifting of capital controls and played down the risk of a flight of deposits from the country once controls are suspended.

For the past 10 years, Charalambos Alexandrou was one of many Cypriots who helped build his country into a modern Mediterranean paradise. But in the last two weeks, he has watched the foundations of his country buckle under a banking collapse. The severe terms of the country’s €10 billion, or $13 billion, international bailout have tied up everyone’s cash, forced huge losses on the biggest savers and are expected to hasten a deep recession that might take years to overcome, the International Herald Tribune reported. Mr.

Argentine officials say their plan for paying $1.4 billion in defaulted debt is fully within the spirit of U.S. court rulings, the Associated Press reported. But Wall Street analysts say the offer looks nothing like the letter of the law as the appellate court sees it. They say the mix of new bonds to be paid out over the next 25 years boils down to just one-sixth of what Argentina was told to hand over in cash.

Banks dealing with people in mortgage arrears will be able to use the minimum income guidelines to be applied by the insolvency service to force distressed mortgage holders to dramatically curtail their spending on essential items such as medical care, it has been claimed, the Irish Times reported. Speaking last night, Fianna Fáil finance spokesman Michael McGrath called for the minimum income guidelines of the Insolvency Service of Ireland (ISI) to be published without delay.

Big depositors at Cyprus' largest bank may be forced to accept losses of up to 60 percent, far more than initially estimated under the European rescue package to save the country from bankruptcy, officials said Saturday, the Associated Press reported. Deposits of more than 100,000 euros ($128,000) at the Bank of Cyprus will lose 37.5 percent in money that will be converted into bank shares, according to a central bank statement. In a second raid on these accounts, depositors also could lose up to 22.5 percent more, depending on what experts determine is needed to prop up the bank's reserves.

A multicolored stack of shipping containers stuffed with goods intended for Cypriot stores towered over this island nation's largest seaport—a monument to the country's financial paralysis, The Wall Street Journal reported. In normal times, thousands of tons of cargo speed through the sprawling complex here every week, feeding Cyprus's import-hungry economy. But with the country's banking system on life support, the cargo network has shuddered to a halt.

The head of South Korea's recently-launched debt restructuring fund said Sunday that it will buy debts held by financial companies just one time, shrugging off worries that repeated help could lead to moral hazards among delinquent borrowers, the Global Post reported on a Yonhap News Agency story. On Friday, the government launched the National Happiness Fund in order to buy debts held by local financial companies, a move aimed at pushing for debt write-offs or debt rescheduling for delinquent borrowers.

Property developer Sean Dunne has listed several of the country's main banks as creditors in a bankruptcy filing made in the state of Connecticut in the United States, the Irish Times reported. The former property tycoon names State-owned AIB, Bank of Ireland and Ulster Bank among more than 30 creditors listed in the court records filed late on Friday. Mr Dunne estimated his liabilities at between $500 million (€390 million) and $1 billion (€780 million) and his assets at $1 million and $10 million in the court bankruptcy filing.