Some of the biggest creditors to the landlords of stricken German department store chain Karstadt are set to approve a landmark debt restructuring plan that could make it appealing to a white knight buyer, Reuters reported. Sources close to the situation said more than 75 percent of noteholders in the 1.2 billion pound Fleet Street 2 Commercial Mortgage Backed Securitisation (CMBS) will agree emergency measures to protect the value of their bonds, boosting Karstadt's survival prospects. If the plan is agreed as seen, this will be one of the largest CMBS restructurings of its kind.

Irish Nationwide has suspended the head of its UK operations as a result of lending practices uncovered by the new management team at the lender, The Irish Times reported. Gary McCollum, who was based in the building society’s Belfast office, oversaw Irish Nationwide’s €4.4 billion UK loan book with Michael Fingleton jnr, the son of the building society’s former chief executive, who worked in the lender’s London office.

The frenzy has left euro zone governments surprised and bruised, and wondering whether there is anything they can do to stop this kind of assault from the financial markets. The answer is probably no, but that doesn't mean they won't try, The Wall Street Journal reported. From the point of view of derivatives traders in Europe, the timing hasn't been good. Just as the decision by Goldman Sachs and one or two other investment banks to pay out billions of dollars in compensation reignited a U.S.

Davos 2010 wrapped up yesterday after five days of yet more soul-searching on how to regulate banking and stop the global financial world creating another crisis, The Irish Times reported. The economic summit concluded with much the same message as last year – governments need to co-operate. What’s different this year is that Davos, with all its aspirations for global agreement, was faced with governments wanting to go it alone. The contentious issue is US president Barack Obama’s planned banking reforms, unveiled just six days before Davos.

Credit Suisse Group AG said Tuesday it would slash the awards of top bankers in London, the first bank to publicly do so in response to the U.K. government's controversial tax on bonuses, The Wall Street Journal reported. The bank said its global bonus pool will be cut by 5%, and the awards for 2009 performance of some 400 managing directors in the London office will be reduced by an additional 30%, as a way to offset the new, one-time bonus tax. The move comes as international will to add taxes on banks, such as the U.K. bonus tax, gathers steam.

A tough new requirement by Britain’s securities regulator that top banking executives and earners must defer 60 percent of their total compensation for a three-year period is pushing some American banks with extensive London operations to say that they just won’t take it anymore, The New York Times reported. Their taxes are on the rise, they have become political piñatas and now, just as one of the richer bonus seasons in recent years gets under way, they are being told by regulators how to pay — or not to pay, to be precise — their employees.

Foreign investors were a major force in New York’s real estate boom of the last decade, with families and companies from Dubai to Australia swallowing weekend apartments and Midtown office towers. In 2007, the roster of international investors came to include a British firm, Dawnay Day, whose executives had a splashy reputation for spending millions on fine art and yachts, The New York Times reported. The efforts [to regentrify East Harlem neighborhoods], though, didn’t get far before the recession spread across the globe and Dawnay Day went bust.

Aidan Birkett, the man charged with sorting out Dubai World's $26 billion debt pile, could face an uphill struggle to restructure the company that's at the heart of the emirate's financial crisis, Dow Jones reported. Birkett, 56, managing director of Deloitte's corporate finance department, was parachuted in last month as chief restructuring officer of Dubai World. He has little time to work his magic, with creditors already baying for blood as the maturity of a $3.52 billion sukuk, or Islamic bond, issued by Dubai World's real-estate unit Nakheel approaches on Dec. 14.

European Union finance ministers on Wednesday reached a compromise on a new supervisory framework for the bloc's financial markets, The Wall Street Journal reported. Under the plan agreed by the ministers, the EU will create two new supervisory groups for financial markets: a "macro-prudential" body to study big-picture risks to stability and three "micro-prudential" groups to look at specific issues in the banking, securities, and insurance and pension sectors.

U.S. carmaker General Motors' decision to keep its European unit Opel will benefit European taxpayers, especially in Britain, Germany and Spain, British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson said on Thursday, Reuters reported. He said he believed workers at GM's Vauxhall unit in Britain would prefer to keep the same management rather than have new owners, but gave no details of how the restructuring of the company would be financed.