Headlines

Insolvent German drugstore chain Schlecker aims to find an investor by the end of May, its administrator told a German magazine, Reuters reported. "If everything goes according to plan, we can be done with the investor process by the Pentecost holiday," Arndt Geiwitz told weekly Wirtschafts Woche, according to an excerpt of an article to be published on Monday. Unlisted Schlecker, which competes with privately held peers Rossmann and dm, filed for insolvency in January after struggling to secure funds against a gloomy economic backdrop.

Europe's low interest rates are fueling rising house prices in Germany, presenting the region's policy makers with a fresh challenge in their fight to restore its economic health, The Wall Street Journal reported. Signs of a property-price boom in parts of Germany are becoming a headache for the European Central Bank, which has for the past two years struggled to fashion a single stance on interest rates and support for banks that fits countries as disparate as depressed Greece and mighty Germany.

Six out of 10 families in Seoul are indebted with the mountain of debt owed by households surpassing 200 trillion won (about $178 billion) last year, official figures showed Sunday, The Korea Times reported. According to the Seoul Development Institute (SDI), a think tank operated by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the capital’s households owed more than 204 trillion won to financial companies as of last November, which represented an annual 4.8 percent rise. About 60.9 percent of the households were in debt at the end of December, up 0.8 percent from the third quarter.

Chancellor George Osborne will use a 28 billion pound ($44.36 billion) asset transfer from taking on the Royal Mail's pension fund to pay down government debt next year, a government source said on Sunday, Reuters reported.

Despite the European Central Bank's massive injections of cash since December to help the euro-zone's banking sector avoid a liquidity crisis, there are scant indications that the money has started trickling down to companies and households on the periphery of the monetary union, analysts and economists say. The result is a lending squeeze in countries such as Portugal and Spain that could lead to a number of bankruptcies, even-higher unemployment and a deeper economic contraction that will make any recovery difficult, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Spanish house prices tumbled at their fastest pace on record in the fourth quarter, a sign that a long-running property bust will continue to weigh on Spanish households and banks, The Wall Street Journal reported. House prices fell on average by 11.2% in the fourth quarter from the same period a year earlier, well below the 7.4% decline in the third quarter, while prices of used homes was down 13.7% in the period, the country's statistics agency INE said Thursday.

The chairman of NAMA says it can avoid making a loss over its lifetime, but admits there is little chance of recovering the face value of loans held by the agency, Independent.ie reported. Frank Daly yesterday said he was confident NAMA would recover the €31bn it paid banks for property loans, plus the cost of running the agency, over its 10-year lifetime. Mr Daly and NAMA chief executive Brendan McDonagh were addressing a meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform.

Troubled U.K. music retailer HMV PLC Thursday said a number of potential buyers are looking at its HMV Live unit, as the firm struggles with dwindling high-street sales and crippling debts, Dow Jones DBR Small Cap reported. The announcement follows speculation in the U.K. press Wednesday that closely held U.S. company Anschutz Entertainment Group, owner of London's O2 Arena, was preparing a GBP65 million ($102 million) bid for the business.

Private investor Gary Klesch said on Thursday that his Swiss-based company has submitted the only bid for insolvent refiner Petroplus' French plant Petit-Couronne, Reuters reported. Asked if it was true that his firm had made an offer for the refiner, he said: "It is. We were told by the court there were no other bids ...We are in negotiations on the others." Klesch also confirmed an earlier report that his firm had pledged to invest 160 million euros in the refinery over five years and to retain around 410 of 550 jobs.

With no room to spend its way back to growth in next week's budget, Britain's government is straining to find creative ways to boost the economy and betting on new schemes aimed at helping the private sector spark recovery, Reuters reported. But chancellor George Osborne's much-vaunted plans to boost bank lending to small businesses and encourage pension funds to invest in Britain's creaking infrastructure look set to be tarred with disappointment before they are even launched.