Portugal

Portugal’s top bankers have called on Europe’s leaders to stop “playing with fire” and moderate their stance towards the eurozone periphery, or risk instilling alarm among bank depositors in future. In separate interviews, the heads of the country’s two biggest banks – Millennium BCP and Banco Espírito Santo – said they were concerned that the precedent set by Europe’s treatment of Cyprus’s recent troubles had increased nervousness across the eurozone to dangerous levels. “Leaders need to moderate their language.

Portugal's government said on Sunday its EU and IMF lenders had concluded work on the latest bailout review, indicating there were no outstanding obstacles for Lisbon to receive the next 2 billion euro tranche of the rescue package, Reuters reported. The review, which had been practically sealed in March, hit a snag early last month when the constitutional court threw out some of this year's austerity measures. But the government presented a plan to compensate for those, along with wider deficit reduction steps until 2015 worth 4.8 billion euros.

Bailed-out Portugal added to the unemployment woes of southern Europe on Thursday as the country's jobless rate hit a startling 18% of the working population, The Guardian reported. The first quarter figures from the national statistics institute revealed that youth unemployment had soared even higher, with 43% of the under 25s who are not studying now unable to find work. "It is a dramatic and brutal increase," said Helena Pinto, a deputy for the Left Bloc party, who also pointed to a leap in emigration by people desperate to find work.

Inspectors from Portugal's bailout creditors are returning to Lisbon to assess whether the government's latest austerity measures merit unblocking a due disbursement of rescue funds, the Associated Press reported. Portugal's 78 billion euro ($102 billion) bailout two years ago spared the country from bankruptcy, but in return it must slash spending and debt. In what was seen as a warning over lack of compliance, the bailout lenders last month halted payouts after Portugal's Constitutional Court disallowed some of the government's pay and pension cuts.

Portugal plans to avoid the threat of needing another bailout by making another 4.8 billion euros ($6.3 billion) in cuts over the next three years, with measures including raising the retirement age by one year to 66 and laying off around 30,000 government workers, the prime minister said Friday, the Associated Press reported. Pedro Passos Coelho announced the proposals in a prime-time televised address to the nation. Portugal received a 78 billion euro rescue in 2011 after overspending, heavy debts and weak growth left it close to bankruptcy amid the eurozone's financial crisis.

Lisbon is to take court action against JPMorgan and Spain’s Banco Santander over what it says were “toxic” derivatives sold to public sector companies, the Financial Times reported. The move is part of a government effort to stem potential losses of up to €3bn from complex hedging products. The allegations in Portugal are similar to cases in Italy, where a court convicted banks of mis-selling derivatives, and the UK, where the “big four” banks have been ordered to review their selling of interest-rate swap contracts.

Portugal's government plans to lower company tax rates "significantly" as part of a wider plan of incentives to drag the economy out of its worst recession since the 1970s, economy minister Alvaro Santos Pereira said, the Irish Times reported. He also promised to step up the financing of the economy by state-owned bank CGD that will provide €1 billion euros this year and €2.5 billion in 2014, and later to create a development bank to boost such funding further, especially for exports-oriented small and medium-sized companies.

A recent court decision blocking cuts in wages and pensions for public employees in Portugal is forcing the government of one of Europe's most fragile economies to move beyond palliative measures and try to overhaul the underlying structure of an inefficient public sector, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Portugal unveiled an ambitious stimulus program on Tuesday to resuscitate its economy despite new concerns about some public companies that could hit the government's budget plans, The Wall Street Journal reported. Economy Minister Álvaro Santos Pereira said the government will aim to cut the corporate tax rate, provide incentives for foreign companies to move to Portugal, tackle a highly bureaucratic system that hurts investments and offer financing for small- and medium-size enterprises at attractive terms. Mr.

Portugal could struggle to avoid a second international rescue even if it, alongside Ireland, is granted more time to repay its existing bailout loans by eurozone finance ministers meeting in Dublin on Friday, the Financial Times reported. Portugal, which is tussling to meet its deficit reduction targets during a deep recession, would have to raise a lot more in the two years after its planned exit from the bailout programme in 2014 than it did in pre-crisis times, according to a document seen by the Financial Times.