Headlines

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told a national audience on Tuesday that China's state-controlled banks are a "monopoly" that must be broken, in an unusually blunt appeal for a shake-up of the creaky financial system of the world's No. 2 economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr. Wen's declaration on a national radio program on Tuesday represents an unprecedented 11th-hour push for an overhaul by China's top economic official, who formally came into office in 2003 with a reputation as a reformer but has acknowledged publicly his regrets that he didn't go far enough. Mr.

Lucchini group has sold its key foundry, Bari Fonderie Meridionali (BFM), to the Czech DT - Vyhybkarna a Strojirna AS, as part of Lucchini's debt restructuring plan, the Italian steelmaker said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Lucchini, owned by Russia's Severstal and Severstal's owner Alexei Mordashov, reached a deal with shareholders and creditor banks in December, to restructure Lucchini's 720 million euro ($960.41 million) debt pile. The debt agreement is widely seen as paving the way for a potential sale of the debt-burdened Italian steelmaker to a third party.

Unemployment in the euro zone reached its highest level in almost 15 years in February, with more than 17 million people out of work, and economists said they expected job office queues to grow even longer later this year, Reuters reported. Joblessness in the 17-nation currency zone rose to 10.8 percent - in line with a Reuters poll of economists - and 0.1 points worse than in January, Eurostat said on Monday.

Q-Cells SE, once the world’s largest solar-cell maker, fell to a record low in Frankfurt trading before the German company said it will file for insolvency as soon as tomorrow, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Q-Cells tumbled 41 percent to 13 euro cents as of the close of trading in Frankfurt. The manufacturer held its initial public offering in October 2005, when the shares sold at 38 euros apiece. The stock has plunged 77 percent this year as Q-Cells worked to reorganize debt while Germany’s government reduces solar subsidies and the industry fights overcapacity.

The overall participation rate in an unprecedented Greek debt restructuring deal has exceeded Greece's expectations, a senior finance ministry official said Monday, despite some holders of Greek foreign law bonds still refusing to take part in the offer, Dow Jones reported. The official said 97% of the bonds involved in Greece's debt restructuring agreement, which cleared the way for its EUR130 billion bailout, have been tendered in the swap, beating the 95% target the country was aiming for under the plan.

Rede Energia, the cash-strapped Brazilian power distribution company, will reach out to creditors to seek an out of court debt restructuring as it pledged to keep servicing its onerous foreign liabilities, Reuters reported. The company will contact holders of its U.S. dollar-denominated perpetual notes as "part of a potential debt restructuring program," according to a securities filing signed on Monday by Maurício Halewicz, the company's investors relations director.

Richard Chandler, the New Zealand billionaire and biggest shareholder of Sino-Forest, has hired a team to plan a rescue restructuring of the Chinese timber group after it filed for bankruptcy protection last week, the Financial Times reported. Richard Chandler Corporation, his investment vehicle, said on Monday that it had assembled a group including David Walker, an expert in the Asian forestry sector, to lead its proposal for the restructuring of Sino-Forest. “Sino-Forest faces a range of complex problems,” Mr Walker said.

Japan's credibility as a future investment location could be hurt unless the government takes aggressive fiscal reforms decisively and swiftly, according to the new chairman of the Japanese Bankers Association, The Wall Street Journal reported. But the country's banks, among the biggest buyers of Japan's government bonds in recent years, aren't likely to face an immediate risk of the kind of sovereign debt crisis seen recently in Europe, said Yasuhiro Sato in a recent interview.

Even as the European banking crisis shows signs of easing, lenders across the Continent are engaging in a variety of maneuvers to avoid, or at least delay, coming to terms with potential problems lurking on their books, The Wall Street Journal reported. Some banks are concocting unorthodox structures designed to improve all-important capital ratios, without raising new capital or moving unwanted assets off their balance sheets.

Video games seller Game Group's British stores were sold to investment firm OpCapita on Sunday, safeguarding nearly 3,200 jobs, the collapsed retailer's administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said. The private equity firm, which bought electrical goods retailer Comet last year, will buy all 333 of Game's British shops that have remained open during its administration, Reuters reported. It will also seek to re-employ a small number of staff who previously worked at Game's head office but received redundancy notices last week, it said in a joint statement with PwC.