United Kingdom

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.

Initial data on British third-quarter growth showed the economy there remained mired in recession, while releases from the euro area Friday presented a picture of steadily improving activity, The New York Times reported. The large debt burden on British consumers is the main reason for the divergent performance, analysts said. A preliminary release from the Office of National Statistics in London showed gross domestic product contracted by 0.4 percent between July and September from the previous three months and shrank by 5.2 percent compared with a year earlier.

More than $3 billion can be paid back to hedge fund clients of Lehman Brothers, a London judge ruled on Wednesday, the latest in a string of court cases triggered by the investment bank's failure, Reuters reported. Administrators of Lehman Brothers' London operations, PricewaterhouseCoopers, asked the London high court for a ruling on how to treat cash raised after Lehman collapsed.

Canadians are being urged to pay close attention to the plight of workers from bankrupt Nortel Networks Corp. because it could some day be their own story, The Toronto Star reported. With many company pension plans across the country underfunded, workers could easily see their pensions and other benefits reduced dramatically or disappear if their employer closes the doors for good. Ken Georgetti, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, predicted that pension and benefit protections will be front and centre in the next federal election.

Ukrainian state energy firm Naftogaz, battered by higher gas import prices and the country's deep recession, said on Monday investors in its $500 million Eurobond had agreed to its restructuring terms, Reuters reported. The company, often at the centre of energy rows with Russia that have previously led to supply cuts to Europe, wants to swap its entire foreign debt -- including the Eurobond -- for a new 5-year issue worth $1.65 billion. Bondholders gathered in London in Monday after weeks of consideration and overwhelmingly approved the new terms.