Headlines

Polish builder PBG has extended a deadline on a debt restructuring deal with its lenders and broadened its scope to include its financing needs over the next year, it said on Monday, Reuters reported. The engineering and construction group is among several Polish builders to run into trouble on infrastructure deals with razor-thin margins in an ambitious road-building programme ahead of the Euro 2012 soccer games Poland will co-host this summer. "The process of negotiations on granting and launching bridge financing by banks has been prolonged," PBG said.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called for a show of force from European authorities as his government sought ways to avoid tapping markets to fund the bailout of the nation’s third-biggest lender, Bloomberg reported. “Europe has to dissipate any doubts about the euro,” the premier told a hastily called news conference in Madrid yesterday.

The 6,000 customers of MF Global Holdings Ltd's Singapore arm should get well over 90 percent of their money back from the collapsed brokerage, although its creditors may have a tougher time recovering all they are due, Reuters reported. MF Global filed for bankruptcy in the United States on Oct 31, 2011 after a $6.3 billion bet on European sovereign debt spooked counterparties and investors.

European officials are stepping up contingency planning for a possible Greek exit from the euro zone, even as Europe's leaders struggled to overcome differences on how to resolve the currency bloc's crisis at a summit meeting, The Wall Street Journal reported. Emerging from Wednesday night's informal European Union summit, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti said most leaders had backed issuing common debt, or euro-zone bonds, to help support troubled members. But Germany and others opposed them and demanded Greece do more.

The prospect of fresh action to boost the flagging British economy loomed larger on Thursday after official figures showed a steeper fall in activity than previously thought and the crisis-hit eurozone drifted towards a deeper slump, The Guardian reported. Labour seized on data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that gross domestic product declined by 0.3% in the first three months of 2012 as evidence that Britain is ill-prepared to withstand a deterioration in the rest of Europe over the coming months.

The owner of German department store chain Karstadt, Nicolas Berggruen, is interested in buying insolvent drugstore chain Schlecker, a person close to the U.S.-German investor said on Thursday, Reuters reported. A creditor meeting is scheduled for Friday to decide over Schlecker's future and possibly pick a buyer for what's left of the chain, which has closed 2,000 of its outlets. Daily paper Stuttgarter Nachrichten earlier said Berggruen entered the sales process two weeks ago, bidding between 100 million and 500 million euros ($126-$630 million).

Catalyst Paper Corp, a Canadian paper and pulp producer under creditor protection, will attempt to sell its assets after a proposed restructuring plan failed to win the backing of its unsecured lenders, Reuters reported. The plan won overwhelming support from its secured lenders, but fell slightly short of the two-thirds backing it needed from unsecured lenders, the Richmond, British Columbia-based company said. The company was granted creditor protection in January, as it attempted to restructure its business.

Struggling lender Dexia SA said it is in exclusive talks to sell its Turkish Denizbank AS unit to Russia's biggest bank, OAO Sberbank, as the Belgian-French bank continues to sell assets to shore up its balance sheet, The Wall Street Journal reported. No financial information was disclosed, but a person familiar with the talks said a deal could be worth between $3 billion and $4 billion and be "the biggest in Sberbank's history." The details are to be ironed out in the next two weeks, the person added. State-controlled Sberbank is Russia's oldest and largest bank.

A UK competition probe could define the future of the "Big Four" accounting firms after the European Union delayed its reform of the multi-billion euro sector until after it reports, Reuters reported. KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and Ernst & Young check the books of nearly all blue-chip companies in the world and many policymakers want this "oligopoly" cut down to size so that the EU's 8,300 listed companies have more choice of auditor. The Big Four are also under the gun for giving clean bills of health to banks just before they had to be rescued by taxpayers in the 2007-09 financial crisis.

Worries that Greece might default on its debts or even leave Europe’s currency union have deepened since May 6, when Greeks voted in shocking numbers for a left-wing party willing to tear up Greece’s $170 billion international bailout agreement, the International Herald Tribune reported. These days, even though 80 percent of Greeks say they want to stay with the euro, talk of “drachmageddon” can be heard in conversations all around Athens — in executive suites, at mom-and-pop shops and even in nightclubs.