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An accounting error is forcing Enterprise Financial Services Corp. to slash the profits it reported for 2010 and the first nine months of last year.

Earnings in 2010 may fall by as much as 55 percent from what the bank had claimed, Enterprise announced today. Profits could be cut as much as 33 percent from the bank’s previous reports for the first nine months of last year.

Enterprise Financial, parent of Clayton-based Enterprise Bank, said  that it discovered an “inadvertent” accounting error that overstated profits from loans taken on from failed banks.  Enterprise bought failed banks in recent years in the Phoenix area and Olathe, Kansas, a Kansas City suburb.

Enterprise shares any losses on those loans with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. under the company’s original agreement to buy those failed banks.

The bank holding company delayed the release of its fourth-quarter and full-year results, and canceled an analyst conference call on earnings scheduled for Thursday. It didn’t say when it would release those results.

Enterprise said it expects to keep its “well capitalized” designation under federal bank safety rules.

“We do not believe the error involved any part of our core banking business,” Enterprise President and CEO Peter Benoist said in a press release.  He said trends remain favorable for loan quality, growth of commercial loans and deposits.

Despite the mistake, Benoist said Enterprise still made a profit in 2010 and last year from the failed banks it purchased.  Benoist said he expects those profits to continue this year.

The accounting errors will lower 2010’s earnings-per-share to 20 to 25 cents, the bank said.  It had previously reported a 45 cent per-share profit.

For the first nine months of last year, the bank said it would report earnings of 98 cents to $1.15 per share.  It previously reported $1.46.  Earnings for all of last year should be $1.20 to $1.35 per share, the bank said.

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The official in charge of rescue efforts for the Costa Concordia says unregistered passengers might have been aboard the cruise liner when it struck a reef and capsized.

Civil protection chief Franco Gabrielli also told reporters Sunday that relatives of a Hungarian woman have told Italian authorities that she had telephoned them from aboard the ship and that they haven’t heard from her since the Jan. 13 accident. He said it was possible that a woman’s body pulled from the wreckage by divers on Saturday might be that of the unregistered passenger.

He said, however, that the identity of that body and three male bodies found a few days earlier have yet to be established. Twenty people, most of them passengers, are still missing.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

GIGLIO, Italy (AP) _ Rescuers on Sunday resumed searching the above-water section of the capsized Costa Concordia cruise liner, but choppy seas kept divers from exploring the submerged part, where officials have said there could be bodies.

Civil protection officials said that until the waves slacken off, divers will not swim into the submerged part of the vessel near the port of Giglio, a tiny island off the Tuscan coast.

Coast Guard divers have been concentrating on parts of the ship where survivors have said many passengers were awaiting evacuation the night of Jan. 13 after the Concordia’s hull was gashed by a reef as the cruise liner came too close to the island.

After divers on Saturday extracted a woman’s body from a corridor near what had been an evacuation staging point, the death toll rose to 12. Twenty people, most of them passengers, are still missing.

So far, the Concordia’s fuel tanks are holding, but special crews are waiting for the end of rescue efforts so they can extract 2,200 metric tons (nearly half a million gallons) of heavy fuel.

In a separate undersea mission, police divers on Saturday swam into the captain’s cabin to retrieve his safe, suitcases and documents guaranteed personal loan approval.

The Italian captain is under house arrest as prosecutors investigate him for suspected manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship while many of the 4,200 passengers and crew were still aboard.

Rescuers are racing against the clock, because the Concordia has been slightly shifting on its precarious perch on a rocky ledge of seabed close to where the seabed steeply plunges.

The search had been interrupted early Sunday after instruments monitoring any movement of the Concordia indicated that vessel had shifted slightly.

Three bodies were found in waters around the ship in the first hours after the accident. All the bodies found since then have been recovered by divers inside the Concordia. The victims were apparently unable to escape the lurching ship during a chaotic evacuation launched almost an hour after the accident.

Operator Costa Crociere, a subsidiary of U.S.-based Carnival Cruise Lines, has said that Capt. Francesco Schettino had deviated without permission from the vessel’s route in an apparent maneuver to sail close to the island and impress passengers.

Schettino, despite audiotapes of his defying Coast Guard orders to scramble back aboard, has denied he abandoned ship while hundreds of passengers were desperately trying to get off the capsizing vessel. He has said he coordinated the rescue from aboard a lifeboat and then from the shore.

Light fuel, apparently from machinery aboard the capsized ship, has been spotted in the water, authorities said Saturday, but there has been no indication that any of the heavy fuel oil has leaked from the ship’s double-bottomed tanks.

Giglio is in the middle of a national marine park renowned for its pristine waters.

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Greece is confident a debt relief deal with private creditors that is crucial to avoid default can be reached “very soon,” a government spokesman said Friday.

Prime Minister Lucas Papademos met for a third day with negotiators from the Institute of International Finance, which represents the private creditors who are being asked to take a loss on their bondholdings to lighten Greece’s debt load by euro100 billion ($129 billion).

“The atmosphere of the talks is good, they are continuing today and we hope they will be concluded very soon,” government spokesman Pantelis Kapsis told private Radio 9.

“This is very important for the sustainability of the national debt and our ability to handle the debt.”

Papademos was joined by Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos at a 90-minute meeting Friday with top IIF officials Charles Dallara and Jean Lemierre.

Venizelos told reporters the talks would resume at 7:30 p.m. (1730 GMT) following an afternoon tele-conference with eurozone officials.

An agreement is needed if Greece is to get the next batch of bailout cash that would prevent a devastating debt default _ Greece does not have enough money to cover a euro14.5 billion bond repayment in March.

The bond-swap deal is part of a second bailout agreed by eurozone countries, worth euro130 billion ($168 billion) in loans and support for banks.

Under the proposed deal, private creditors would cancel 50 percent of their Greek debt in exchange of a cash payment and new bonds with a longer maturity.

But the negotiations stalled last week over a disagreement on the interest rate those new bonds would have.

The two sides are now considering a proposal to set an interest rate of below 4 percent that would gradually increase until 2020, according to European officials.

Louka Katseli, a minister in the previous Socialist government, said the talks were being complicated by the involvement of a large number of parties with a stake in the debt deal.

“This does not only involve Greece and the creditors,” Katseli told private Skai television.

Heavily involved behind the scenes are countries like Germany, which is paying the bulk of Greece’s rescue loans, and the IMF, which is also involved in the bailouts. There are also the individual bond holders, like hedge funds which have bought Greek bonds but at the same time also hold default insurance, Katseli said.

Also Friday, international debt inspectors arrived in Athens to assess whether Greece is doing enough to get more bailout cash.

Officials from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund met with Venizelos. They will scrutinize Greece’s public finances to make sure it is on track with painful austerity reforms needed to keep tapping rescue loans.

Near-bankrupt Greece has been surviving on a euro110 billion ($142.02 billion) rescue loan program from European countries and the IMF since May, 2010, but required additional help to meet its funding needs.

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Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo reiterated a pledge to make extra budget cuts amid slower economic growth while calling on the European Union to step up efforts to bolster the region

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An Italian coast guard official vehemently demanded that the captain go back to his crippled cruise ship to oversee its evacuation, but the captain repeatedly resisted, according to a shocking audiotape made public Tuesday.

Prosecutors have accused Capt. Francesco Schettino of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his vessel before all passengers were evacuated during the grounding of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the Tuscan coast on Friday night.

After Schettino was interrogated by prosecutors for three hours Tuesday, a judge in Grosseto, Tuscany, ruled that the captain, who had been detained a few hours after he allegedly abandoned the Concordia, should be released from jail and confined to his home near Naples under house arrest, his lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, told reporters outside the courthouse.

Prosecutors wanted him kept in Grosseto’s prison, and Leporatti had asked that he be freed.

The death toll from the tragedy nearly doubled to 11 on Tuesday when divers extracted the bodies of four men and one woman from the ship’s wreckage. The victims were in their 50s or 60s and each wore the orange vest that passengers use, indicating they were apparently passengers and not crew members, said a Coast Guard spokesman, Cmdr. Filippo Marini. Their nationalities were not immediately determined.

Prior to that grim finding, the coast guard had raised the number of missing to 25 passengers and four crew members. Italian officials gave the breakdown as 14 Germans, six Italians, four French, two Americans, one Hungarian, one Indian and one Peruvian. But there was still confusion over the numbers, with the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin listing 12 Germans as confirmed missing.

The Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 people when it hit a reef off the Tuscan island of Giglio after Schettino made an unauthorized deviation from the cruise ship’s programmed course, apparently as a favor to his chief waiter, who hailed from the island.

Schettino has insisted that he stayed aboard until the ship was evacuated. However, a recording of his conversation with Italian Coast Guard Capt. Gregorio De Falco indicates he fled before all passengers were off _ and then resisted De Falco’s repeated orders to return.

“You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear?” De Falco shouted in the audio tape.

Schettino resisted, saying the ship was tipping and it was dark. At the time, he and his second-in-command were in a lifeboat and the captain said he was coordinating the rescue from there. He also said he was not going back aboard the ship “because the other lifeboat is stopped.” Passengers have said many lifeboats on the exposed port side of the ship didn’t winch down after the ship had capsized.

De Falco shouted back: “And so what? You want to go home, Schettino? It is dark and you want to go home? Get on that prow of the boat using the pilot ladder and tell me what can be done, how many people there are and what their needs are. Now!”

“You go aboard. It is an order. Don’t make any more excuses. You have declared ‘Abandon ship,’ now I am in charge,” De Falco shouted.

At one point, De Falco vowed: “I’m going to make sure you get in trouble. … I am going to make you pay for this. Go on board, (expletive)!”

Schettino was finally heard on the tape agreeing to reboard. But the coast guard has said he never went back, and had police arrest him on land.

The 52-year-old Schettino, described by the Italian media as a genial, tanned ship’s officer, has worked for 11 years for the ship’s owner and was made captain in 2006. He hails from Meta di Sorrento, in the Naples area, which produces many of Italy’s ferry and cruise boat captains. He attended the Nino Bixio merchant marine school near Sorrento.

Schettino recounted his version of events before prosecutors and the judge at Tuesday’s hearing in Grosseto to decide whether he should remain jailed.

The captain could face up to 12 years in prison on the abandoning ship charge alone.

Leporatti told the hearing the captain had insisted that after the initial crash into the reefs he had maneuvered the ship close to shore in a way that “saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.”

Passengers, however, described the evacuation as chaotic.

Steve and Kathy Ledtke, who live in Fort Gratiot, Michigan, said they were sitting down to a late dinner Friday when they realized something had gone wrong. Kathy Ledtke told WDIV-TV that it seemed no one was in charge.

“It was complete chaos and it was every man for himself,” Kathy Ledtke said. “Nobody knew where to go.”

Earlier Tuesday, Italian naval divers exploded holes in the hull of the grounded cruise ship, trying to speed up the search for the missing while seas were still calm. Navy spokesman Alessandro Busonero told Sky TV 24 the holes would help divers enter the wreck more easily.

“We are rushing against time,” he said.

The divers set four microcharges above and below the surface of the water, Busonero said. Video showed one hole above the waterline less than two meters (6 feet) in diameter.

Mediterranean waters in the area were relatively calm Tuesday with waves of just 12 inches (30 centimeters) but they were expected to reach nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) Wednesday, according to meteorological forecasts.

A Dutch shipwreck salvage firm, meanwhile, said it would take its engineers and divers two to four weeks to extract the 500,000 gallons of fuel aboard the ship. The safe removal of the fuel has become a priority second only to finding the missing, as the wreckage site lies in a maritime sanctuary for dolphins, porpoises and whales.

Preliminary phases of the fuel extraction could begin as early as Wednesday if approved by Italian officials, the company said.

Smit, a Rotterdam, Netherlands-based salvage company, said no fuel had leaked from any of the ship’s tanks and that the tanks appeared intact. While there is a risk the ship could shift in larger waves, to date it has been relatively stable perched on top of rocks near Giglio’s port.

Smit’s operations manager, Kees van Essen, said the company was confident the fuel could safely be extracted using pumps and valves to vacuum the oil out to waiting tanks.

“But there are always environmental risks in these types of operations,” he told reporters.

The company said any discussion about the fate of the ship _ whether it is removed in one piece or broken up _ would be decided by Italian ship operator Costa Crociere and its insurance companies.

The Miami-based Carnival Corp., which owns the Italian operator, estimated that preliminary losses from having the Concordia out of operation at least through 2012 would be between $85 million and $95 million, along with other costs. The company’s share price slumped more than 16 percent Monday.

It was not yet clear if the ship _ which was completed in 2006 _ would ever be able to return to service.

Carnival said its deductible on damage to the ship was approximately $30 million. In addition, the company faces a deductible of $10 million for third-party personal injury liability claims.

Carnival said other costs related to the grounding can’t yet be determined.

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U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said he sees some reason for optimism in Europe, while acknowledging that 2012 is set to be a challenging year.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner