Headlines

Nortel Networks Corp, the fallen Canadian telecom giant, said on Tuesday it is selling its sprawling Ottawa campus to the Canadian government for C$208 million ($202 million), Reuters reported. Nortel, once North America's biggest telecommunications equipment maker, said the sale is expected to close at the end of the year. The 370 acres of land and its 11 interconnected buildings had been a proud symbol of the company's dominance in its field and of Canada's technical prowess.

Inflows of capital are posing a growing risk to East Asian macro-economic stability, according to the World Bank’s half-yearly review of regional trends, the Financial Times reported. The report comes amid concern in Asia that a likely fresh round of US Federal Reserve quantitative easing, dubbed “QE2”, will unleash a destablising wash of funds into the region.

President Nicolas Sarkozy vowed Tuesday “to guarantee order,” restore fuel supplies and crack down on “troublemakers,” as a quarter of France’s gas stations ran dry and other disruptions built from nationwide protests and strikes, the International Herald Tribune reported. His comments marked a hardening of the government’s resolve to hold to its program of reforming the indebted pension system despite the job actions by public workers at refineries and railways and in other key sectors. The final parliamentary vote on the plan may not come until early next week.

Creditors of Aer Arann are set to receive €2.2 million from the airline’s new investors in settlement for their debts, The Irish Times reported. This is part of a scheme of arrangement that has been put together by Aer Arann’s examiner, Michael McAteer of Grant Thornton. Some creditors – notably the Dublin Airport Authority – are set to receive all of the money they are owed under the terms of the scheme, but others will get back just 2 per cent. It is understood that AIB’s exposure of €5.2 million would be rolled over into the new entity.

The debt-strapped U.K. government announced an 8% cut in its military budget, undertaking a delicate attempt at cutting personnel and military hardware without jeopardizing the country's place among the world's biggest military powers, The Wall Street Journal reported. The cuts announced Tuesday by British Prime Minister David Cameron mark the Ministry of Defence's biggest one-off reduction since the dawn of the Cold War.

Anglo Irish Bank has secured a temporary court injunction restraining the wife of its former chief executive David Drumm from transferring the couple’s former home in Co Dublin from her sole ownership back to the joint ownership of her husband and herself, The Irish Times reported.

Italy’s debt costs more to insure against default than that of the Philippines or Indonesia, as Europe’s debt woes overshadow a credit rating six levels higher than either of the emerging-market nation, Bloomberg reported. Credit-default swaps on Italy, the only borrower among Europe’s so-called peripheral nations not to suffer a cut in its credit rating since last year, trade at 166.5 basis points. That’s more than the 127 basis points for Indonesia, or the 126 basis points for the Philippines.

Serious Fraud Office chief executive Adam Feeley has confirmed transactions disclosed in the National Business Review concerning South Canterbury Finance's murky involvement in the Auckland Hyatt Regency hotel are part of the investigation his office launched this morning. Mr Feeley said the suspect loans stretched back to 2005, but the timeframe could be stretched as his investigation progressed. The NBR reported in last weeks' print edition that South Canterbury's financial interest in the Hyatt began in 2002.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has aligned himself with German chancellor Angela Merkel in her push for changes to the European treaties to fortify the EU’s economic system, The Irish Times reported. In a joint declaration issued in Deauville last night, the two leaders said they had reached a new consensus on measures to strengthen Europe’s system of economic governance.

Here are some interesting questions from an Irish MEP which boil down to this: How come Allied Irish Banks passed the European bank stress test in July and three months later the Irish authorities stepped in to announce a €3 billion capital injection? Alan Kelly, an opposition Labour MEP, has written to European competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia, who oversees state aid programs, posing three questions, The Wall Street Journal Real Time Brussels blog reported. Was the bank giving a truly accurate assessments of its projected losses?