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A group of Italian investors is ready to stump up over 100 million euros to take control of small cooperative lender Banca Popolare di Spoleto, which was put under special administration this year, Reuters reported. The Clitumnus group of investors said on Tuesday it would underwrite a capital increase of up to 102 million euros. Shares in Popolare Spoleto, in which Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena has a 29.5 percent stake, closed up 3.2 percent at 1.85 euros after the offer by Clitumnus. Clitumnus offered in January to buy a 51 percent stake for 2.10 euros per share.

A planned EU tax on transactions would raise the cost of issuing UK debt by nearly four billion pounds if it were in force this year even though Britain will not impose the levy, a study said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Eleven euro zone countries intend to introduce the tax on stock, bond and derivatives transactions next January to help to make banks pay for aid they received in the financial crisis. There are provisions to ensure the levy is applied no matter where in the world securities from the 11 states are traded.

While the euro zone has been transfixed lately by the Cyprus meltdown, another and potentially bigger European crisis has continued to simmer: record-high unemployment, the International Herald Tribune reported. Spending cuts and tax increases aimed at trimming debt and addressing the financial crises in bailed-out euro zone countries, and the rising rate of joblessness in much of the currency bloc, “are feeding off of each other,” said Mark Cliffe, chief economist at ING Group. “It’s a bit of a vicious circle,” he said.

Cement producer AfriSam on Tuesday successfully completed a years-long restructuring programme that reduced its overall debt by more than R15-billion, Engineering News reported. The group, which faced a significant debt burden and almost defaulted on billions of rand of debt over a year ago, now had a sustainable long-term debt solution to the overgearing that resulted from the acquisition transaction that created AfriSam. The total debt remaining on the balance sheet could not be confirmed, but previous reports had indicated that it could be about R6.5-billion.

Suntech Power Holdings Co., forced to put its Chinese solar unit into bankruptcy last month, began that slide into insolvency in 2009 when customers linked to the founder couldn’t pay their bills and the company booked the sales as revenue anyway, regulatory filings show, Bloomberg reported. Seven buyers backed by an investment firm funded by Suntech and its founder, Shi Zhengrong, accounted for 29 percent of Suntech’s uncollected bills as 2009 ended, according to correspondence between the solar company and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Teldat, a small Spanish designer and maker of internet routers for corporate use, is exactly the kind of company the eurozone needs to foster to recover from the debt crisis. With an annual turnover of €80m and 240 employees, the Madrid-based group sits squarely in the small and medium enterprise sector that policy makers say is critical to creating new jobs, the Financial Times reported. But Teldat and other small companies face disproportionately higher charges than their bigger rivals when they borrow money from banks.

Greece will extend a deadline for the recapitalisation of its banks by a few weeks, possibly until the end of May, Greek central bank chief George Provopoulos said on Monday. Greek banks, which are being recapitalised with funds from the country's latest EU/IMF bailout, have been lobbying for the terms of the recapitalisation scheme to be sweetened and also sought an extension to an end-April deadline for the plan. "There will be a small extension of a few weeks, it may be pushed to the end of May," Provopoulos told state TV.

The head of Cyprus’s central bank has sought to deflect blame for the chaos that has engulfed the island’s financial system but has promised a steady lifting of capital controls and played down the risk of a flight of deposits from the country once controls are suspended.

For the past 10 years, Charalambos Alexandrou was one of many Cypriots who helped build his country into a modern Mediterranean paradise. But in the last two weeks, he has watched the foundations of his country buckle under a banking collapse. The severe terms of the country’s €10 billion, or $13 billion, international bailout have tied up everyone’s cash, forced huge losses on the biggest savers and are expected to hasten a deep recession that might take years to overcome, the International Herald Tribune reported. Mr.

Argentine officials say their plan for paying $1.4 billion in defaulted debt is fully within the spirit of U.S. court rulings, the Associated Press reported. But Wall Street analysts say the offer looks nothing like the letter of the law as the appellate court sees it. They say the mix of new bonds to be paid out over the next 25 years boils down to just one-sixth of what Argentina was told to hand over in cash.