Headlines

Struggling car maker Saab has not yet received the 70 million euros ($93 million) worth of bridge financing it needs to survive while it restructures under court protection, a spokesman said on Wednesday. Saab, which has scarcely produced a car for six months, said in mid-September the money was part of a license agreement with Chinese car firm Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile. "The money has not come in yet. We originally thought it would take about two weeks. The process is ongoing, and we will give information as soon as we have the money", Saab spokesman Eric Geers told Reuters.

The International Monetary Fund has said there was no pressing need for the Government to adopt “dramatic” new austerity measures to deal with the slowdown in the global economy, the Irish Times reported. While warning Ireland’s recovery could come under threat from weakening growth in Europe and beyond, the fund’s European director, Antonio Borges, said the Irish economy was performing surprisingly well and said conditions now were much better than before. Ireland’s performance was exemplary but the situation remained challenging, he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Europe’s rescue fund will only be used as a last resort to save banks and that investors may have to take deeper losses as part of a Greek rescue, Bloomberg reported. Merkel’s comments, her most explicit on banks’ role in fighting the debt crisis since the spillover from Greece began to threaten France and Italy, followed talks with European Commission President Jose Barroso in Brussels. Financial shares rose yesterday amid speculation that euro-area policy makers are working on plans to boost bank capital to contain the crisis.

The admission by top European officials that Greece's fiscal distress is deepening has increased the chance that a July deal to give Athens more cash could be revised to exact a greater toll on its private-sector creditors, The Wall Street Journal reported. At a two-day closed-door meeting here that ended Tuesday, European finance ministers debated what to do with their sickest patient. No decisions were made, but the notion of bigger losses for creditors was broached, people familiar with the matter said.

France and Belgium rushed to the aid of Dexia SA on Tuesday, in what will be the first state rescue of a European bank in the euro zone sovereign debt crisis, Reuters reported. The lender to hundreds of French and Belgian towns, which also needed propping up after the 2008 financial crisis, will see its French municipal finance arm broken off and put under the ownership of French state banks.

Euro zone finance ministers understand they need to do more to strengthen the region's banks and to increase the firepower of its bailout fund, British finance minister George Osborne said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Osborne, back from a meeting of European Union finance ministers in Luxembourg, said euro zone governments had been behind the curve and had not done enough to convince markets they had enough financial firepower to deal with the bloc's debt crisis.

Moody's lowered its rating on Italy's bonds by three notches on Tuesday, saying it saw a "material increase" in funding risks for euro zone countries with high levels of debt and warning that further downgrades were possible, Reuters reported. The agency downgraded Italy to A2 from Aa2, a lower rating than it holds on Estonia and on a par with Malta and kept a negative outlook on the rating.

The High Court has sanctioned the draw-down of €738 million from the State's insurance compensation fund by the administrators of Quinn Insurance, the Irish Times reported. The ruling is subject to the court approving the sale of the business to US insurer Liberty Mutual tomorrow. The President of the High Court, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, gave the administrators permission to draw down €320 million from the fund immediately, once the sale is approved, and to make additional calls of up to €418 million through further applications to the court.

Receivers have been appointed to another company in Wellington property developer Terry Serepisos' empire and have taken over the management of his own headquarters, The New Zealand Herald reported. Deloitte's Barry Jordan and David Vance were appointed receivers and managers of Century City Investments on Friday. It owns the ASB Tower on Wellington's Hunter St, which is home to the Century City offices, according to a statement on the accounting firm's website.

The Greek government submitted a 2012 budget Monday that includes sharp increases in taxes and spending cuts in an attempt to bring its deficit back on track. But the country's disclosure Sunday that it would miss budget targets for this year prompted further fears the country would be forced to reschedule its debts, The Wall Street Journal reported. The 2012 deficit is now seen at 8.5% of gross domestic product, or about €18.69 billion ($25 billion)—well above a previous target of €17.1 billion, or 7.8% of GDP.