Headlines

Dozens of euro-zone banks flocked to Eastern Europe in recent years, hoping to harness the region's fast-growing economies and relatively untapped banking markets. Amid Europe's banking crisis, the situation has suddenly been thrown into reverse, The Wall Street Journal reported. Banks are beating hasty retreats from the region, scrambling to conserve limited resources and facing pressure to concentrate on their domestic markets.

Greece’s international rescue program continues to slip as the nation’s leaders shirk promised changes, investors flee a beleaguered banking system and concern that Europe will fall into recession adds to the pressure, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday in its latest report on the country, the International Herald Tribune reported.

The insolvency administrator of Germany's Manroland is still scouting around for parties potentially interested in buying or investing in the world's second biggest printing machinery maker, a German daily said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. "There are other candidates who are better but there are not many of them," administrator Werner Schneider said in a prereleased version of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's Wednesday edition. Schneider said he had therefore mandated investment bank Lazard to assist in the search for potential candidates.

Senior European officials said on Tuesday that it could be difficult to convert last week's summit accord for tougher budget discipline among euro-zone governments into a watertight legal pact, emphasizing the agreement's path to fruition could be tough, The Wall Street Journal reported. As the reassessment continued of the results of last week's summit of European Union leaders, the euro sank further against the dollar, following Monday's sharp declines.

Unite, the union representing cabin crew at Thomas Cook Group's U.K.-based airline, said Tuesday that it struck an agreement with the company over pay and job cuts late last month to avoid putting the troubled travel group's future in jeopardy, Dow Jones DBR Small Cap reported. The agreement, which neither Unite or Thomas Cook had disclosed until now, preceded an emergency-financing deal in late November in which Thomas Cook's bankers agreed to an extended GBP200 million ($310.7 million) loan facility and relaxed financial covenants on existing loans.

The UAE’s insolvency laws have been in force since 1993 but lawyers are hard pressed to come up with a single example of their being used to wind down a struggling company. Untested and widely regarded as unworkable, they are in bad need of replacement, the Financial Times beyondbrics blog reported. The juddering impact of the global financial crisis has persuaded the government to draft a new set of regulations, which will hopefully allow companies to conduct orderly wind-downs through the courts. It won’t be easy.

The federal government is providing the corporate watchdog with $11.4 million in additional funding to help strengthen scrutiny of the insolvency industry, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. Outgoing Attorney-General Robert McClelland released a suite of new proposals for the industry on Wednesday. They include new money for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) to reform the way insolvency professionals are registered, disciplined and regulated.

It would be Europe’s worst nightmare: after weeks of rumors, the Greek prime minister announces late on a Saturday night that the country will abandon the euro currency and return to the drachma, the International Herald Tribune reported. Instead of business as usual on Monday morning, lines of angry Greeks form at the shuttered doors of the country’s banks, trying to get at their frozen deposits. The drachma’s value plummets more than 60 percent against the euro, and prices soar at the few shops willing to open.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron's decision last week to veto a new European Union treaty aimed at solving the euro-zone debt crisis puts a spotlight on the slew of pending legislation in Brussels aimed at the EU-wide financial-services sector—and the stakes for London's financial sector if it isn't able to influence it, The Wall Street Journal reported. The freshly chilled relations between the U.K. and the EU resulting from Mr.

Singapore-based majority shareholder in Eircom, ST Telemedia (STT), has made a balance sheet restructuring proposal to the independent directors of the debt-riddled company, the Irish Times reported. Earlier this month STT surprised many observers of Eircom’s fortunes when it said it would not be submitting a proposal “owing to the continuing macro-economic uncertainty in the euro zone”. The announcement by the Singapore fund came as Eircom’s syndicate of first-lien lenders were to meet to discuss their co-ordinating committee’s proposal to take over the heavily indebted business.