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The European Union will seek to broker a tentative compromise on curbs of banker bonuses as diplomats and lawmakers attempt to overcome eight months of conflict on how to apply Basel rules to the bloc’s lenders, the Irish Times reported. The Republic will draft revised proposals on bonuses ahead of today’s negotiation meeting, according to two EU officials not authorised to be cited by name. Governments have accepted that any deal on the Basel law will need to contain binding pay rules if it is to win European Parliament approval, said the officials.

Bulgaria's finance minister stepped down on Monday after tens of thousands of people took to the streets over the weekend to protest electricity prices, raising pressure on the government, which until recently had managed to retain its popularity despite an austerity drive, The Wall Street Journal reported. Simeon Djankov, a former World Bank official who won the respect of financial markets for undertaking painful reforms but courted controversy in Bulgaria as a fiscal hawk, said he was resigning as finance minister, effective Sunday. Mr.

The Official Stanford Investors Committee and the court-appointed receiver of Allen Stanford's financial empire have sued Antigua and Barbuda, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and 23 former Stanford Financial Group Co executives, accusing them of assisting in the financier's $7 billion (4.5 billion pounds) Ponzi scheme, Reuters reported. The committee is seeking at least $90 million of transfers to Antigua, according to the complaint filed on February 15 in U.S. Federal Court in Dallas. It also is seeking punitive damages.

The involvement of the Irish Central Bank in the promissory deal is "problematic", Germany's Bundesbank said in its monthly report Monday, the Irish Times reported. The German central bank highlighted what it described as "the increasingly stronger and more problematic inter-linkage between monetary and fiscal policy in the European monetary union". "The European Stability Mechanism, which should be responsible in this regard, has been established to provide any help to individual member states in servicing debt," it said.

It has taken four rotating European Union presidencies, the current draft law runs to more than 1,000 pages, and European Council experts have a special suitcase to carry the document from meeting to meeting. But now, more than 1½ years after the original proposal from the European Commission, EU officials believe member states and the European Parliament may finally be close to a deal on new capital requirements for banks in the 27-country bloc, The Wall Street Journal Real Time Brussels blog reported.

German banks' use of European Central Bank crisis funding dropped by a third in January from the previous month, a further sign that banks in the heart of the euro zone are returning to money markets after last year's credit squeeze. Banks in countries on the periphery of the 17-member bloc still rely on central bank lending, which, while at a record-low interest rate of 0.75 percent, is above market rates. The divergence complicates the ECB's interest rate-setting plans.

Small retail clients who invested in Spain's nationalised Bankia face substantial losses, with the bank's shares temporarily suspended on the Madrid stock exchange on Thursday morning amid rumours that existing stock would be declared almost worthless, The Guardian reported. The Frob, the country's bank restructuring fund, was forced to admit that the price it will set for swapping debt into shares at the bailed-out bank would be low – but denied reports that it would value shares at just 1 euro cent each.

The U.K.'s opposition Labour Party said Thursday it would introduce a levy on homes worth more than £2 million ($3.1 million) and use the money raised to cut income tax for low earners if it was in power now, backing a tax on property that has divided the governing coalition, The Wall Street Journal reported. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats have long championed a "mansion tax" on houses worth more than £2 million.

The euro zone's economy shrank last quarter at the fastest pace since the height of the world recession in early 2009, as a worsening slump in Italy and other southern European countries infected the bloc's core economies of Germany and France, The Wall Street Journal reported. The 2.3% drop in euro-zone gross domestic product in the fourth quarter, at an annualized pace, suggests that Europe's economic and financial crisis is far from over.

The government stepped up its campaign against companies paying less than their fair share of tax when it announced details on Thursday of new rules that may bar corporate tax dodgers from competing for public sector contracts, Reuters reported. Companies bidding for government contracts will have to provide details of their tax compliance history, including tax returns that have been judged incorrect, under the draft new rules. "The government is clear that aggressive tax avoidance is totally unacceptable," Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the treasury, said in a statement.