EU finance ministers meeting on Tuesday (16 March) will call for cash to be mobilised "urgently" to help developing countries tackle climate change, according to a draft statement seen by EurActiv.

Wolfgang Schäuble, German finance minister, wants a European monetary fund to be backed by tough sanctions to enforce budgetary discipline, with countries facing expulsion from the eurozone "as a last resort"

Handelsblatt notes that European finance ministers are expected to agree a draft of the EU’s proposed AIFM Directive, aimed at regulating hedge fund and private equity managers, next Tuesday. The article notes that “even the British government…has given up its blockade.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich secured a majority coalition in parliament today (11 March), which voted in a new government headed by his ally Mykola Azarov, a former finance minister.

The FT reports that German Bundesbank President Axel Weber has said that proposals, announced by the German Finance Ministry and backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, for the creation of a European Monetary Fund (EMF) are “not helpful” and are “a sideshow that will distract from the necessary consolidation” of budget deficits in struggling countries such as Greece.

In the third of our series on the future of health care, Victoria Lambert look at the hospitals built under Tony Blair's Private Finance Initiative.

In case you wouldn’t have noticed, another crisis has come on top of the big one. For those who understand French, read carefully this article in the March 5 edition of French daily “Le Monde” . A former German finance vice-minister buries the euro as it is now and advises all Southern-Europe economies (including France) to

French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised on Sunday (7 March) that eurozone countries would help Greece if its financial problems worsened. Meanwhile, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said he plans to make proposals soon on a new European institution to help ensure the stability of the euro zone.

The admission by the German finance minister that he believes that the EU needs a monetary fund marks a key move towards designing a more economically integrated zone

Um, isn’t this man supposed to know something about finance and the City? creating common rules on the trading of toxic credit default swaps. Toxic? CDSs? What is he on about? Around and about the only credit market that remained open and liquid during the crisis is “toxic”? The market in which hedge funds in the last few