United Kingdom

European politicians and regulators could initiate a continent-wide ban on speculative trading of sovereign credit-default swaps tomorrow. Making it stick without the Americans won’t work, BusinessWeek reported on a Bloomberg story. New York and London dominate swaps trading, and both have resisted greater regulation. Last year, U.S. regulators and Congress rejected a proposed ban on buying credit-default swaps without owning the underlying debt. Adair Turner, chairman of the U.K.

The president of Iceland has urged Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, to take personal responsibility for settling the dispute over €3.9bn lost by British and Dutch savers in the Icesave bank after Icelandic voters overwhelmingly rejected a deal to repay the money. Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, whose decision to block the repayment plan triggered Saturday's referendum, told the Financial Times it was "high time" for Mr Brown to "take the matter into his own hands" after more than a year of wrangling.

Dubai World is expected to approach lenders for the first time this week with a suggested proposal for restructuring $22 billion of its debts, according to people close to the situation, the Financial Times reported. The troubled conglomerate has called leading creditors to London for meetings starting as early as Monday. Bankers expect the one-on-one meetings to reveal the first details of a formal proposal, which the government has said should be finalised this month.

European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet pressed Greece to halt its flirtation with International Monetary Fund aid and work with European allies to tame its record budget deficit, Bloomberg reported. As protesters besieged the Greek Finance Ministry to denounce €4.8 billion ($6.5 billion) of tax increases and spending cuts, the Athens government said the absence of European support might force it into the hands of the IMF.

La Seda de Barcelona SA late Tuesday said more than 75% of its creditors had agreed to a lockup agreement that allows the loss-making chemical firm to use an increasingly popular U.K. insolvency tool to refinance its debt, Dow Jones reported. The Barcelona-based company is trying to get its lenders to agree to the restructuring of €600 million of its debt by converting €150 million into equity, extending the maturity of €250 million by eight years, and the remaining €200 million by five years. The syndicated loan was signed in London in June 2006, allowing the company to employ the U.K.

Courts in Canada and the United States have rebuffed a British pension regulator's attempt to drag Nortel Networks Corp. into a separate legal battle in the United Kingdom over a multibillion-dollar claim, a Nortel lawyer said, allowing the company to focus on the liquidation of its global assets, The Globe and Mail reported. The British Pensions Regulator had been trying to argue a $3.4-billion claim on behalf of Nortel's 40,000-plus pensioners in the U.K., where Nortel's collapse triggered a pension crisis.

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.