Headlines

Suntech Power, a Chinese manufacturer that became the world’s largest producer of solar panels by 2011 only to be battered by plummeting prices, announced on Wednesday evening that its main operating subsidiary had been pushed into bankruptcy by eight Chinese banks, the International Herald Tribune reported. Suntech was the Icarus of the solar panel industry, with production that soared year after year on heavy investment, as Western investors bought up its New York-traded shares and its international debt issues.

The government launched incentives to help struggling home buyers on Wednesday as it looks to support growth in a real estate market it sees as key to reviving the country's ailing economy, Reuters reported. Chancellor George Osborne said Britain would commit 3.5 billion pounds over the next three years to shared equity loans for new-build homes worth less than 600,000 pounds, allowing buyers to purchase them with a 5 percent deposit. "For newly built housing, government will put up a fifth of the cost," he said in a budget speech to parliament.

The special liquidators of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation are believed to have served legal papers on four former directors of the Irish Nationwide building society, the Irish Times reported. The former directors are facing legal action in relation to their stewardship of Irish Nationwide prior to its nationalisation in 2010 and subsequent merger with Anglo Irish Bank into IBRC. This follows a move by IBRC last year to take legal action against the directors of the building society.

The European Union is to press ahead with planned banker bonus curbs that were opposed by the U.K. after Britain failed to water down a tentative agreement from last month, Bloomberg reported. European Parliament lawmakers and Ireland, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, kept bonus restrictions unchanged, as they sealed a deal yesterday overhauling bank capital and liquidity rules for the 27-nation EU.

Cyprus’s finance minister arrived in Moscow on Tuesday night to try to wrest vital economic assistance from the Kremlin as his country’s parliament rejected a €10bn EU-led bailout that requires €5.8bn to be seized from Cypriot bank accounts, the Financial Times reported. The 11th-hour attempt to tap funds from Russia as an alternative to the deposit levy stunned leaders in Brussels, who said they were taken aback by the resistance of Cypriot lawmakers to shifting the tax’s burden exclusively on to deposits over €100,000 – many of which are held by wealthy Russians.

The creation of a single supervisor for European banks moved a step closer Tuesday when European lawmakers struck a deal with member states on the structure of the new agency, The Wall Street Journal reported. The deal leaves in place most of the main points agreed on by European Union finance ministers in December for how the supervisor should function. The setting up of a supervisor is aimed to tighten oversight of the euro zone's 6,000 banks and to prevent a repeat of the financial crises that have hit the likes of Spain, Greece and Cyprus. Non-euro-zone members can also sign up.

Spanish property firm Renta Corporacion said on Tuesday it would file for insolvency, the latest real estate company to struggle to make debt payments as a prolonged downturn hits business and prices, Reuters reported. Creditors for the company - with debt of 162 million euros ($210 million) - include Banco Popular, ING Real Estate Finance, Deutsche Bank, Caixabank, SAE, Banco Caixa Geral and Sareb, the holding set up by the government to handle soured property assets, the company said in a statement.

Lloyds Banking Group is considering the sale of about €650 million of Irish real estate loans as the lender extracts itself from Western Europe's biggest property crash, according to a person with knowledge of the planned transaction, the Irish Times reported. The UK's second-biggest government-aided bank will have to sell at a discount, the person said without being more specific. He declined to be identified because the sale plans haven't yet been finalised. Lloyds spokesman Ian Kitts, declined to comment.

Central European Distribution Corp , the maker of Russian Standard Vodka, said it has scrapped a bond exchange after a rival company owned by its chairman made its own offer for the same notes, Reuters reported. Roust Trading Ltd, owned by Russian billionaire and CEDC Chairman Roustam Tariko, has offered to buy the CEDC notes that it does not own for $25 million in cash and $30 million in secured notes issued by Roust. Tariko's company owns approximately $102.6 million of the $258 million of the 2013 notes, which matured on March 15 without a payment from CEDC.

Voluntary administrators have been called in by the Australian fund manager in charge of a giant mortgage fund frozen since 2009 with the savings of many New Zealand investors trapped in it, Stuff.co.nz reported. The directors of LM Investment Management appointed John Park and Ginette Muller of FTI Consulting as voluntary administrators, saying the move was forced on it as a result of a smear campaign against it. LM was set up by Kiwi ex-pat businessman Peter Drake but after growing rapidly it hit trouble following the Global Financial Crisis as many of its property loans defaulted.