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The Serious Fraud Office has dropped its investigation into Mutual Finance and Viaduct Capital and handed information to the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) to consider, The National Business Review reported. Mutual Finance operated in its final days under the Crown Retail Deposit Guarantee scheme. When it collapsed into receivership last July, it owed 450 investors about $17 million. Related property financier, Viaduct Capital, was put into receivership in May 2010 owing 110 depositors $7.8 million.

The Quinn family’s Swedish company is “hopelessly insolvent” and has no possibility of repaying massive loans owed to Anglo Irish Bank, lawyers for the bank told a Swedish court yesterday, the Irish Times reported. Quinn Investments Sweden has no more than 30,000 Swedish Krona (€3,277) in its coffers and lacks the assets to cover the 16 billion SEK (€1.8 billion) owed to the bank, Anglo’s lawyers said. Anglo wants a bankruptcy receiver appointed to Quinn Investments, the holding company for the family’s international properties in Russia, Sweden, Britain, Turkey and Ukraine.

Troubled Swedish carmaker Saab, owned by Netherlands-based Swedish Automobile , said on Tuesday it had offered a deal to suppliers over unpaid debts in an effort to get production restarted, Reuters reported. Saab said on Monday its Trollhattan factory in southern Sweden would be idle for two more weeks after having stood still for most of April and May because it could not pay its suppliers and ran out of parts.

Greece's prime minister survived a crucial confidence vote in Parliament, rallying his Socialist deputies and solidifying support for a package of tough budget cuts that European authorities have demanded as a prerequisite for more aid to the ailing country, The Wall Street Journal reported. Prime Minister George Papandreou, reeling from political pushback against those cuts, took a gamble by calling for the vote. To assuage some of the anger, he shuffled his cabinet last week and sidelined the finance minister identified with the measures. In a roll call, Mr.

Unlike their government, Greek banks were seen as well managed and prudent before the crisis. But they became victims of their government’s debt woes, severed from international lines of credit and able to borrow only from the European Central Bank, the International Herald Tribune reported. Now the banks complain that the E.C.B. is pressuring them to reduce their dependence on central bank funding, hurting not only the banks but Greek businesses and consumers who are unable to get credit. Alexandros Manos, managing director of Piraeus Bank, argues that the E.C.B.

The receiver of Lombard Finance & Investments is at loggerheads with the Inland Revenue Department over a $4.5 million tax bill relating to the sale of a building before the failed lender was wound up, Business Day reported. PricewaterhouseCoopers' John Fisk said the transaction pre-dated the receivership and involved a property being sold to a purchaser financed by Lombard. The tax department is claiming the transaction was a mortgagee sale, which means the tax liability would remain with Lombard. "The evidence we have and the tax advice we've had clearly has the seller as a borrower.

Iceland's economy is on the mend after the 2008 collapse of its banking system, but the country needs to beef up regulation and oversight of financial firms further to avoid future problems, the OECD said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Iceland plunged into recession in 2009 after its biggest banks collapsed in the space of a few day when credit dried up globally. The government was powerless because banks' liabilities were eight times greater than the country's gross domestic product.

Greece will get its next quarterly installment of bailout money only if the country's Parliament passes a contentious package of budget measures, European finance ministers said after a two-day meeting in Luxembourg, The Wall Street Journal reported. They also made long-planned changes to the euro zone's bailout funds. The ministers deferred any final decision on the installment payment until early July, after the vote in Parliament, and showed modest signs of progress toward a broader agreement for a bigger package of aid to Greece for coming years.

Not for the first time during the slow-motion car crash that is the euro zone's fiscal crisis, policy makers are tying themselves in knots in an effort to minimize collateral damage, The Wall Street Journal Agenda blog reported. They fret over whether ratings agencies and other self-appointed market regulators will define investors' participation in a new Greek funding package as a default.

Judges in the U.S. and Canada have pushed Nortel Networks Corp.'s warring units back into mediation, urging them to reach a deal over how to divide some $4 billion raised in the telecommunications company's global liquidation, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. The prospect that Nortel's creditors around the world could wait a long time to find out how much of the cash they will get is "troublesome," Judge Kevin Gross of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., wrote. The wait is due to a dispute over whether Nortel should divide the cash in court, as Nortel U.S.