Mexico City - Mexico's central bank cut the leading interest rate by 25 basic points Friday to leave it at 7.5 per cent.

This was the second interest rate cut in Mexico in little over a month.

The Bank of Mexico said the global financial crisis continued to get tougher, and said that, although inflation has shown a downward trend since January, "the strong financial turbulence that was observed recently represents a risk."

Geneva  - Shares in UBS tumbled badly Friday, a day after the United States authorities issued a lawsuit against the bank demanding that it hand over about 52,000 names of clients.

At one point in early morning trading the stocks dropped 17 per cent, and ultimately closed the day at 11 Swiss francs, down 14 per cent from its opening price.

The bank, the largest in Switzerland, said it would challenge the US lawsuit.

Amsterdam - The price of shares in Dutch bank and insurer ING Bank continued its free fall on Friday.

Half an hour after trading began at the Amsterdam stock exchange ING shares had lost 7.61 per cent and stood at 4.26 euros (5.41 dollars) per share.

The continued drop in share value was triggered following the publication of ING's final quarterly report on Wednesday.

The report said the bank had suffered a loss of 3.7 billion euros in 2008, compared with a profit of 2.4 billion euros in the same period in
2007.

ING's net loss for all of 2008 amounted to 729 million euros, compared with a net profit of 9.2 billion euros in 2007.

Zurich - The largest Swiss Bank, UBS, would comply with the terms of a deal reached with the US Justice Department, a spokesman confirmed Thursday, in order to avoid prosecution and settle claims of conspiring to help thousands of wealthy US citizens evade taxes.

The bank would pay 780 million dollars in fines and would transfer information on accounts of clients who most likely committed fraud, said spokesman Serge Steiner.

"UBS will fully comply" with the agreement, he added.

Paris - The world economic crisis will last well into 2010 unless the global banking sector is restructured and cleansed of its toxic assets, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warned Thursday in Paris.

"If there is no clean-up of the banks, most of the stimulus will be lost," Dominique Strauss-Kahn said, adding: "Things are moving too slowly."

"We are still looking for a recovery at the beginning of 2010, but only if the right policies are implemented," Strauss-Kahn said at a press conference opening the OECD Global Forum on Competition in Paris.

Paris - French bank BNP Paribas said Thursday that its profits fell by 61.4 per cent, to 3.02 billion euros (3.8 billion dollars), in 2008.

The fall in profits was primarily due to a loss of 2 billion euros by its Finance and Investment Bank, because of the effects of the bankruptcy of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers, the bank said in a press statement.

BNP Paribas said it had lost 1.37 billion euros in the fourth quarter of last year, as the financial crisis deepened.

While turnover fell a fraction to 27 billion euros, the bank said it would slash dividend payments from 3.35 euros last year to 1 euro in
2009.