Headlines

Mann Construction plunged into administration today, becoming the latest victim of the credit crunch, Construction News reported. A spokesman for Enfield-based Mann Construction said administrators had been called in this morning, but that no-one was available to comment further on the matter. The firm which carried civil engineering, groundwork and reinforced concrete work mainly in the South-east was formed in 1996. Its accounts for the year ending April 2007 show the firm had a turnover of £67 million.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who pledged to freeze his own salary last night, said U.K. companies shouldn’t award big bonuses to executives whose efforts have backfired, Bloomberg reported. “Most people who have worked hard to build up their firm or shop don’t understand why any company would give rewards for failure or how some people have grown fabulously wealthy making failed bets with other people’s money,” Brown told religious leaders at St. Paul’s cathedral in London today.

German unemployment rose more than economists forecast in March as foreign and domestic demand weakened, affecting companies’ profits and forcing them to cut costs and jobs. The number of people out of work rose a seasonally adjusted 69,000 to 3.4 million, the Nuremberg-based Federal Labor Agency said today. Economists forecast an increase of 52,000, according to the median of 32 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. The adjusted jobless rate rose to 8.1 percent from 8 percent. Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, the world’s largest maker of printing presses, and Kloeckner & Co.

U.K. mutual Nationwide Building Society has acquired core parts of Scotland's largest building society, including its retail and wholesale deposits, the Bank of England said Monday, in a rescue deal engineered by the central bank and backed by the Treasury. The Bank of England said it organized the sale of Dunfermline Building Society over the weekend, under the new Special Resolution Regime, The Wall Street Journal reported. Dunfermline was expected to announce 2008 losses of £26 million ($37.2 million). U.K.

Japanese condominium developer Azel Corp said on Monday it would file for bankruptcy, hit by the property market slump and credit crunch, Reuters reported. It is the latest in a growing list of Japanese real estate companies going under as the world's second-largest economy falls deeper into recession. In a statement, the firm said it had given up trying to continue its business and would liquidate it after it failing to secure working capital to service debts. It said its condominium sales have been hurt by the downturn in the property market following the global financial turmoil.

Japan's economy, the second-largest in the world, is shrinking at the fastest pace in more than 30 years, roughly twice as fast as the U.S. economy, The Washington Post reported. Exports and imports declined in February at a record rate, with monthly sales to the United States down nearly 60 percent compared with last year. Tokyo is giving itself public-works medicine for these global trade ills, deploying legions of men and women with flags and hard hats to repave streets, repaint crosswalks and fix broken clocks in city parks.

Spain's central bank will bail out struggling regional savings bank Caja de Ahorros Castilla La Mancha, marking the first time a Spanish financial institution has been rescued since the current financial crisis began, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Spanish government said on Sunday that the Bank of Spain will take over management of the troubled lender, known as CCM, and inject liquidity to keep it afloat, backed by government loan guarantees of up to €9 billion ($12 billion).

The overnight oustings of Rick Wagoner and Christian Streiff as chief executives of General Motors and Peugeot Citroën respectively, today sent tremors through the boardrooms of Europe's battered auto industry, The Guardian reported. Dieter Zetsche, head of Mercedes owner Daimler, and Norbert Reithofer, head of Quandt family-controlled BMW, could be next in the firing line as premium carmakers suffer disproportionately from the global collapse of sales.

The unthinkable is happening in once-booming Dubai where credit not many months ago was as easy as the lifestyle--the world financial crisis is spawning a rising number of loan defaulters, Agence France-Presse reported. And as jobs are slashed and liquidity dries up in the Gulf emirate, borrowing has become almost impossible, especially for items such as luxury cars, financial experts and traders say.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, an avowed friend of the United States and the leader of the European Union’s biggest economy, is diplomatic about the coming visit by President Obama. But she is clear that she is not about to give ground on new stimulus spending, stressing the need to maintain fiscal discipline even as she professes to want to work closely with the new American president. “International policy is, for all the friendship and commonality, always also about representing the interests of one’s own country,” Mrs.