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PARIS - European leaders met in Paris on Sunday for a summit designed to hammer out a coordinated bank rescue package before the resumption of trading in panic-stricken stock markets.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the current head of the European Union, said he hoped to persuade his counterparts "to speak with once voice" in a bid to contain the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
After talks with Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown -- who has already part-nationalised some of his country's major banks -- Sarkozy was to meet with the 14 colleagues from the single-currency euro bloc in the Elysee Palace.
As he greeted European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, who is also joining the talks, Sarkozy said he expected a "coordinated, ambitious" plan to contain the financial crisis to emerge from their discussions.
"We're going to receive the British prime minister to explain to him what we are going to propose to the eurogroup," Sarkozy told reporters.
"On Wednesday we're going to try to get all of Europe facing in the same coordinated and ambitious direction," he said, referring to this week's Brussels summit of all 27 European Union members.
"That's what I expect: Europe speaking with one voice," he added.
Barroso told reporters that the financial measures on the table for the eurozone 15 would "go beyond what was agreed at the G7", referring to a meeting Friday in Washington of the world's major industrialised powers.
"We now need an unprecedented level of coordination to deal with this unprecedented crisis."
Europe appears to have decided to follow Britain's lead in providing funds to not only prop up individual banks, but to free up the vital short term loans between institutions that keep capital markets moving.
Brown's government has set aside 250 billion pounds (315 billion euros) to guarantee this trade, in addition to 200 billion pounds in short term loans and 50 billion to buy stakes in major banks.
London hopes this part-nationalisation, which has been accepted by some of its biggest institutions, will unfreeze capital and restore confidence after the worst week on world stock markets since the crash of 1929.
"I am going to Paris to persuade other European countries to adopt the comprehensive approach we have taken in Britain," Brown wrote in an article in the Sunday Mirror newspaper.
"For Europe, the stakes could not be higher and this is a moment of truth. No country -- not even the biggest -- can make it just on their own at a time like this. We are all in it together and have to work to solve it together."
In addition to the plans already announced, the British government is also preparing to take controlling stakes in Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS, two of the banks worst affected by the financial crisis, reports said Sunday.
The unprecedented move would make the government the biggest shareholder in the banks and government representatives would be installed on their boards,
the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph newspapers reported.
The banks declined to comment on the reports, but an industry source told AFP that the banks could make an announcement on Monday.
Sarkozy confirmed that there would be an emergency cabinet meeting on Monday to examine a plan to guarantee interbank loans, followed by an address by the president to the nation in which he would "announce a number of measures".
MPs said a law on guaranteeing French banks would go before parliament this week.
And in Germany, Europe's biggest economy, press reports said that, following the meeting in Paris, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government would announce a rescue package worth several hundred billion euros for its banks.
Berlin is expected to guarantee interbank loans with between 300 and 400 billion euros (405 to 540 billion dollars) and to provide banks with fresh capital in exchange for shares in the banks, as in the British plan.
Portugal's finance minister also announced Sunday that his government was offering a 20-billion-euro state guarantee for banks headquartered in that country.
- AFP/ir
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