Midlands property developer Tony Diskin has secured Irish High Court approval to escape almost €25 million in Celtic Tiger-era debts from his property development business, the Irish Times reported. Mr. Justice Alexander Owens granted Mr. Diskin a personal insolvency arrangement (PIA) – a mechanism that allows individuals to escape significant bank and other debts – which will see him return to solvency with payment of a lump sum of €30,000. Some €25,000 of this will go towards repaying a fraction of his €24.9 million in debts.

A receiver has been appointed to Altada Technology Solutions, the troubled Cork-based data management and artificial intelligence company led by husband and wife duo Allan Beechinor and Niamh Parker, the Irish Times reported. Documents filed with the Companies Registration Office indicate that Grattan Boylan, Alan Bruce, Lynn Bruce and Noreen Gallagher – who provided debt finance to the company in September – have appointed Nicholas O’Dwyer, a partner in Grant Thornton as receiver to Altada after months of speculation about its future.

Ireland's central bank is to ease mortgage-lending limits to allow first-time property buyers to borrow up to four times their income, in a move it said could help meet growing building costs but could also modestly push up prices, Reuters reported. The central bank introduced limits in 2015 capping how much banks can lend for the purchase of a home relative to its value and the borrower's income in a bid to prevent a repeat of excessive lending that devastated the economy over a decade ago.

Irish inflation moderated to 8.2 per cent in September from 8.7. per cent in August, the second consecutive monthly decline in the annual rate of consumer price increase, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) said on Thursday, the Irish Times reported. Prices have been rising steadily since April last year, triggering the worst cost of living squeeze in decades with consumer price inflation topping five per cent for 12 months in a row. The headline inflation rate declined 9.1 per cent in August to 8.7 per cent in September, the first drop-off in seven months.

A package of measures to help businesses contend with soaring energy prices will likely include low-cost loans and grants targeted at the sectors most affected, Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Varadkar said last week that the bulk of Ireland's budget surplus, expected to reach up to 5 billion euros ($4.99 billion) or around 2% of national income, should be spent on one-off measures to help consumers and businesses with rising prices.

The governor of the Irish Central Bank has warned the Government that budgetary measures to cushion the impact of inflation need to be temporary and targeted to limit the risk of fueling further price growth, the Irish Times reported. In a pre-budget letter to the Minister for Finance, Gabriel Makhlouf also highlighted the significant budgetary risk posed by corporation tax receipts, suggesting the public finances were now “highly exposed to business decisions of a small number of firms”.

Former Trinity Biotech chief executive Brendan Farrell, co-founder of insolvent medical diagnostics company HiberGene Diagnostics, is looking for potential buyers for the business in a last-ditch effort to save it, the Irish Times reported. Mr. Farrell, who also served as chief executive of HiberGene until he resigned from the board of the company in 2018, told the Irish Times on Friday that he had spoken to one Irish investor and two from outside the country with a view to securing funding to keep the business afloat.

The volume of retail sales fell by 8.1 per cent in the year to July as sales of motors, food, beverages, and tobacco all saw double digit reductions despite the easing of the Covid-19 emergency, the latest data from the Central Statistics Office shows, the Irish Times reported. Four sectors showed an annual increase in the volume of sales. The largest of these was in bars where sales soared by 56.8 per cent compared with July 2021 when some Covid-19 restrictions still applied. However, bar sales remained 8.4 per cent lower than pre-Covid-19 levels in February 2020.

Endo International Plc filed for bankruptcy yesterday after reaching a $6 billion deal with some of its creditors, as the U.S. drugmaker seeks to settle thousands of lawsuits over its alleged role in the country's opioid epidemic, Reuters reported. The pharmaceutical company is the latest to file for chapter 11 to address opioid claims. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, filed in September 2019, while Mallinckrodt Plc, a generic opioid manufacturer, recently emerged from bankruptcy.