Switzerland's financial regulator has investigated 12 banks and launched enforcement proceedings against two of them in relation to corruption charges against longtime central banker Riad Salameh, it said on Monday, Reuters reported. Lebanese authorities charged Salameh, his brother Raja and one of his assistants on Thursday with money laundering, embezzlement and illicit enrichment after months of delay in the high-profile case. The Salameh brothers have denied wrongdoing throughout the process.

The World Bank on Friday announced $2.5 billion in additional grant financing from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID )to support Ukraine's budget and maintain essential services, Reuters reported. The latest financing under the World Bank's Public Expenditures for Administrative Capacity Endurance in Ukraine(PEACE) project lifts the total to $20.6 billion and will support salaries in core government functions and sectors such as healthcare and education while allowing Kyiv to pay pensions and support internally displaced people.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Union leader Ursula von der Leyen are set to hold face-to-face talks, with expectations high they will seal a deal to resolve a thorny post-Brexit trade dispute, the Associated Press reported. That would mark a breakthrough after months of bitter wrangling that has soured U.K.-EU relations, sparked the collapse of the Belfast-based regional government and and threatened to set back Northern Ireland's decades-old peace process. In a joint statement on Sunday the U.K.

The German economy shrank by 0.4% in last year’s fourth quarter, the national statistics office said Friday, a sharp downward revision from its initial report that gross domestic product declined by 0.2%, the Associated Press reported. The quarter-on-quarter contraction in the October-December period was the first since the first quarter of 2021. Consumer spending, which propped up growth in the first nine months of last year, dropped by 1% in the final three months of 2022. Investment in construction and machinery showed bigger drops in the final quarter, the Federal Statistical Office said.

Within months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, there was near panic in Europe over energy supplies. Mainstay flows of natural gas through pipelines from Russia were dwindling to a relative trickle, pushing wholesale prices up more than 10 times the level of a year earlier. Oil prices were high. Lawmakers warned of fuel rationing and rolling blackouts, and winter loomed. Now Europe has plenty of gas, much of it from Norway, the shale fields of Texas, and Qatar.

In the space of just five years, a little-known company on the outskirts of London has grown into a payments-industry powerhouse, processing more than 1 billion euros ($1 billion) in transactions every month, Bloomberg News reported. Backed by licenses from regulators in the UK and Lithuania, Transactive Systems Ltd. touted itself as “one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in Europe,” with an ability to service clients from “compliance-intense industries” including cryptocurrencies, gambling and foreign-exchange trading, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg.

Euro zone inflation was only a touch higher in January than earlier estimated, Eurostat said on Thursday, confirming that price growth is now well past its peak, even if underlying price pressures still show no signs of abating, Reuters reported. Consumer price inflation in the 20 nations sharing the euro eased to 8.6% in January from 9.2% a month earlier, coming in just above the 8.5% estimated earlier this month, when figures from Germany, the bloc's biggest economy, were not yet included.

Shares of Cineworld slumped as much as 22% on Wednesday after media reports said the world's second-largest cinema operator had received 40 non-binding bids, but none for its UK and U.S. assets or nearing its $6 billion secured debt load, Reuters reported. The reports cited company counsel Joshua Sussberg's comments to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston on Tuesday, where he also said the initial bids received by a Feb. 16 deadline were all for the rest of Cineworld's global assets, mainly for theatres in central Europe, eastern Europe and Israel.

The European Parliament´s budget control committee said Wednesday it has found no evidence of deceit or fraud in Spain’s handling of the 31 billion euros ($33 billion) it has received so far in special European Union post-pandemic recovery funds, the Associated Press reported. But a visiting delegation urged the Madrid government to be more transparent and flexible in its use of the funds and in providing public information about them.