Headlines

Investor concerns over Italy and Spain are complicating efforts to deliver Greece its next chunk of rescue aid, underscoring the increasing difficulty Europe faces in reining its more than year-old credit crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. Greece is due to receive the next installment of its original, €110 billion ($158 billion) bailout in September. But Italy and Spain, both of which committed to extend bilateral loans to Greece with other euro-zone countries, have seen their own borrowing costs rise recently.

The National Asset Management Agency, which has been tasked with clearing the mountain of bad debt amassed by Ireland's property developers, has launched a firesale of 850 properties including pubs in Somerset, towers blocks in Canary Wharf and golf courses in Ireland, The Guardian reported. The bad bank has just published a full list of properties across the UK and Ireland that are effectively up for sale, having been placed in receivership. It has already been inundated with hundreds of calls from bargain hunters.

The Yukos Oil Company was forced into bankruptcy by the Moscow Arbitration Court five years ago on Monday. Its assets were seized by the state, and its top managers imprisoned or chased from the country. Its legacy of progressive corporate governance and transparency was decimated in favor of shadowy state control, The Moscow Times reported in a commentary. Nobody knows for sure why the Russian government destroyed its most successful post-Soviet company.

McInerney Homes, and a sister Company, McInerney Contracting, has been placed in receivership after the Supreme Court rejected the appeal to a previous High Court decision, InsolvencyJournal.ie reported. The High Court had previously refused to approve a proposed rescue plan, which the Court believed was unfairly skewed against the bank. McInerney Homes was placed into examinership and under High Court protection from their creditors last September. A syndicate of three banks, Anglo Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, and KBC, are owed €113m by the Company.

Ireland’s Department of Finance has warned the nationalised banks not to expect approval for big payoffs on redundancy deals for staff, the Irish Times reported. The banks were directed to draw up new plans based around pay rates on voluntary redundancy in the public sector and to prepare for a level of job cuts to reflect the sharp reduction in the size of the Irish banking sector.

Standard & Poor's said Thursday that as many as 15 Danish banks could default due to loans made to the property and agricultural sectors from 2005 to 2007, hitting the country's ailing banking sector with another potential blow. "Denmark's banking crisis is not yet over," the credit rating institute said, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Read more. (Subscription required.)

A lackluster Italian government-bond auction on Thursday underscored persistent concerns of a new escalation in the European sovereign-debt crisis as borrowing costs spiral higher, The Wall Street Journal reported. Italian funding costs soared when the country sold €7.97 billion ($11.45 billion) in bonds, near the maximum amount targeted, as bond investors kept up the pressure on the highly indebted country. The yield on the 2021 Italian government bond, or BTP, surged to 5.77% from 4.94% at the previous auction June 28.

Portugal's five-week-old government took its first major proposal for labor reform to Parliament on Thursday, seeking approval for a reduction in compensation entitlements for laid-off workers, the Associated Press reported. The proposal is part of a long list of measures Portugal pledged to adopt in return for a euro78 billion ($112 billion) bailout that spared it from bankruptcy and was part of European efforts to contain the continent's debt crisis.

Russian businessman Vladimir Antonov is working on a plan for Saab to pay back a loan from the European Investment Bank, the lender which he says has vetoed his proposal to buy into the ailing carmaker, Reuters reported. Antonov has been waiting in the wings to take a stake in Swedish Automobile , the listed entity that owns Saab, but his spokesman said on Thursday that the EIB had decided not to approve the Russian as a shareholder. "We are working on a way to be rid of the EIB loan," Lars Carlstrom said.

More European companies are warning that the business outlook is worsening amid growing economic head winds, underscoring how the sovereign-debt crisis and slowing world demand are hitting Europe Inc.'s bottom line, The Wall Street Journal reported. German industrial giant Siemens AG, after a reporting a sharp decline in net profit in its most recent quarter, Thursday warned that the economic upswing in general was losing momentum, echoing a message from the world's biggest chemicals company, BASF SE.