Headlines

France said it would cut public spending by €45 billion ($54.48 billion) over the next three years and raise its retirement age, following other European nations that have announced austerity measures, The Wall Street Journal reported. The announcement came ahead of a week in which President Nicolas Sarkozy is scheduled to have talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, and the French government is expected to announce details of a rise in France's current standard retirement age.

Spanish officials acknowledged that the country's banks and companies are having difficulty finding credit, underscoring the pressure Madrid faces to pursue deep structural changes to win back investor confidence, The Wall Street Journal reported. Investors are particularly concerned that Spain would be unable to supply its banks with more capital, if needed, without emergency aid from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Spain has been scrambling in recent weeks to convince markets that it can repair both its ballooning deficit and its troubled banking sector.

BP has tapped financial advisers at Goldman Sachs, Blackstone Group and Credit Suisse as pressure mounts on the British energy giant over the devastating Gulf of Mexico oil spill, US media reported Monday. A BP spokesman denied the reports, saying the group did not want to reveal "who are our advisors and on what they are advising us," Agence France-Presse reported.

Mexican retailer Comercial Mexicana said on Monday that its shareholders have approved a plan to restructure its debt, moving a step closer to the end of a lengthy battle with creditors, Reuters reported. The company, known by analysts as Comerci, is Mexico's No. 3 supermarket operator and defaulted on its obligations after its derivatives bets on the peso soured at the height of the financial crisis in late 2008. Last month, the company, which is controlled by insiders, reached a deal with creditors to pay back around $1.5 billion over seven years.

The newspapers owned by CanWest Global Communications Corp. have received approval from creditors on a plan to emerge from restructuring, The Globe and Mail reported. The company’s unsecured creditors met in downtown Toronto on Monday morning, and an overwhelming majority voted for the plan: 97.36 per cent of the votes cast were in favour. Last week, in preparation for the meeting, the plan for the newspaper division was modified so that the new company would emerge from creditor protection with less debt.

Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. said Monday it will start due diligence on Ssangyong Motor Co. in the next few days so it can decide on submitting a final bid for South Korea's fourth-largest car maker by sales, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Mahindra, India's biggest sport-utility vehicle maker by sales, is among six companies worldwide who qualified earlier this month to conduct due diligence on cash-strapped Ssangyong before submitting their binding bids.

Spain has refuted claims that it is to seek aid from the European Union, The Irish Times reported. Spain's economy ministry said Friday that it has not made a request for economic aid from the European Union, after a report in the FT Deutschland that the EU was preparing an aid package in case Madrid asked for it. The newspaper said that the EU was preparing for an aid application in the months ahead for access to the fund set up to lend to euro zone countries that run into Greek-style payments problems.

Deutsche Bank is deeply involved in the American real estate crisis. After initially profiting from subprime mortgages, it is now arranging to have many of these homes sold at foreclosure auctions. The damage to the bank's image in the United States is growing, Spiegel Online reported in an analysis. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Deutsche Bank now holds loans for American single-family and multi-family houses worth about $3.7 billion (€3.1 billion). The bank, however, claims that much of this debt consists of loans to wealthy private customers.

If emerging markets could teach a lesson to cash-strapped euro-zone nations, it would be that a debt default isn't always the end of the world, Reuters UK reported. At least for Greece, burdened by about 300 billion euros (249.6 billion pounds) in debt it can hardly service, a restructuring could be a less painful alternative, as well as an inevitable political choice as stern austerity measures face growing popular opposition.

The Chinese businesswoman orchestrating a buy-up of the Crafar dairy empire has made the first of two scheduled appearances in court this week in relation to failed business dealings, The New Zealand Herald reported. May Wang made a brief appearance in the Auckland District Court this morning on charges brought by the Ministry of Economic Development in relation to records of her property and hotel company Dynasty Group, now in liquidation.