Iran is unhappy with the current oil prices, its oil minister said Monday, hinting at a proposal for the OPEC to lower its output to compensate for a drop in crude prices.

"Iran's suggestion has always been to reduce OPEC production ceiling," Rostam Qasemi told reporters at a petrochemical conference in Tehran.

Lloyds Banking Group said on Monday that chairman Winfried Bischoff will retire from the post by the middle of next year after overseeing a partial turnaround of the state-rescued British bank.

"The board of Lloyds Banking Group announces that its chairman since September 2009, Sir Winfried Bischoff, will be retiring no later than the shareholders meeting in May 2014. The exact date will be subject to the appointment of his successor," LBG said in a statement.

Japanese electronics giant Sharp will name a new president at its June shareholders' meeting, replacing its current chief after only a year in the job, the Nikkei business daily said Monday.

The struggling firm, which last year warned about its own survival, would name company veteran Kozo Takahashi as its new chief, the paper said.

Banks seized nearly 40,000 homes in Spain last year due to unpaid mortgages, official data showed Friday, as a sharp economic downturn and record unemployment took its toll.

A total of 39,167 homes were seized in 2012, the Bank of Spain said in a bulletin based on a survey of lenders which approve over 85 percent of mortgages in the country.

Bloomberg News said Friday it was curbing reporter access to certain data on its financial terminals after reports claiming its journalists used the devices to spy on Wall Street banks.

A Bloomberg spokesman acknowledged that "limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists," without "security-level" data, trading data or messages.

The Group of Seven top economies are set for a second day of talks on Saturday aimed at spurring growth amid U.S.-Europe divisions over the scale of austerity and renewed market focus on "currency wars" after the yen hit new dollar lows.

Our task is to nurture the recovery," British finance minister George Osborne said Friday as he opened the gathering amid pressure on Britain and other indebted European nations to scale back deep cuts to state spending, in order to support fragile growth.

Cyprus authorities have dropped controls on money transfers and withdrawals for international clients of four foreign banks with branches or subsidiaries in the bailed-out country.

The Finance Ministry said in a statement Friday that the exemption extends to the Cyprus branches of Lebanon's BLOM Bank, the Lebanese and Gulf Bank, Russia's OJSC Promsvyazbank and Russian Commercial Bank.

Preliminary surveys of Lebanese offshore fields show reserves of 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 660 million barrels of oil, caretaker Energy and Water Minister Jebran Bassil said on Thursday, adding that production could begin within four years.

Speaking at the Arab Economic Forum, Bassil said scanning was now complete on 70 percent of the country's territorial waters -- an area of some 15,000 square kilometers (5,791 square miles).

Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta on Friday called for the European Union summit in June to adopt a strategy to combat youth unemployment with concrete measures to be implemented immediately.

"Europe has to provide answers on youth unemployment," Letta said after talks in Rome with European Parliament speaker Martin Schulz.

North Korean visits to China have multiplied over recent years, a Chinese newspaper reported, underscoring growing political and business links between the isolated nuclear-armed state and its sole major ally.

There were a total of 180,600 visits by North Koreans to China in 2012, nearly twice as many as the 103,900 only three years previously, the investigative Southern Weekly said in its latest edition, citing official data.