Britain's government has begun selling its majority stake in bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to reduce state debt and kick-start the lender's full return to the private sector, the Treasury said Tuesday.

The government has sold 5.4 percent of RBS for £2.1 billion ($3.3 billion, 3.0 billion euros), a statement said.

After so much pain, Greece must now figure out how to get its economy back on its feet.

The scale of the country's financial problems is mind boggling — a full quarter of the economy evaporated in the past six years and business activity is now plummeting further. Government cuts needed to qualify for a new bailout will hurt incomes for years to come.

Waste management giant Veolia said Monday its profits in the first half of the year more than doubled to 321 million euros ($352 million), helped by a cost-cutting drive.

The French company, which specializes in water distribution, waste, recycling and energy, said its turnover also rose by 7.3 percent to 12.3 billion euros. 

Mark Karpeles, the head of defunct Bitcoin exchange MtGox, manipulated its computer system at least 30 times over a couple of years, a report said Monday, as Tokyo promised greater efforts to regulate the digital currency.

The fresh allegation against France-born Karpeles, 30, follows his arrest Saturday by Tokyo police, more than a year after the once-dominant exchange collapsed in the wake of fraud allegations.

Greece's stock exchange reopened Monday with a drop of more than 22 percent after a five-week shutdown imposed by the country's debt crisis and capital controls.

The ATHEX plunged to 615.72 points a few minutes after opening at 0730 GMT, down 22.82 percent from its June 26 close.

Donald Trump, widely believed to be the wealthiest U.S. presidential candidate ever, is nowhere among the ranks of the most generous Americans and hasn't donated to his own charity in seven years, according to an Associated Press review of his financial records and other government filings.

The billionaire TV star, who has dominated coverage of the Republican presidential race, has said he donated $102 million worth of cash and land to philanthropic and conservation organizations over the past five years. But his campaign has provided little documentation for most of these contributions, and tax filings of the Donald J. Trump foundation show Trump has made no charitable contributions to his own namesake nonprofit since 2008. Without an endowment, the fund has continued to give grants only as a result of contributions from others.

HSBC announced Monday that net profit fell 3.8 percent in the three months to June, as the company agreed to sell its Brazilian business for $5.2 billion to Brazil's Banco Bradesco.

Europe's biggest bank announced in June that it would cut its global workforce by up to 50,000 as it exits Brazil and Turkey.

French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said in an interview Sunday that his German counterpart Wolfgang Schaeuble was "wrong" to propose a temporary withdrawal from the euro for debt-laden Greece, evoking "a clear disagreement."

"I think Mr. Schaeuble is wrong and even contradicting his own deep European commitment," the French minister said in the interview to be published Monday in the German business daily Handelsblatt, excerpts of which were broadcast Sunday.

Spain could become like Greece if the same austerity policies are imposed on the country, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said in an interview published Sunday.

"Spaniards need to look at their own economic and social situation and based on that evaluate what their country needs, independently of what happens in Greece or wherever," he told center-left daily El Pais.

Greece had a contingency plan in the event of being forced by creditors into a disorderly default, which included nationalizations and a corruption probe targeting German companies, a Greek newspaper reported Saturday.

Efimerida Ton Syntakton daily said the plan -- alluded to by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in parliament on Friday -- was designed "to raise the cost of rupture" for Greece's creditors.