The European Union’s executive arm moved Wednesday to jump-start plans for the 27-nation bloc to abandon Russian energy amid the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, proposing a nearly 300 billion-euro ($315 billion) package that includes more efficient use of fuels and faster rollout of renewable power, the Associated Press reported. The European Commission’s investment initiative is meant to help the 27 EU countries start weaning themselves off Russian fossil fuels this year.

The Russian economy expanded by 3.5% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2022 after growing 5% in the previous quarter, data from federal statistics service Rosstat showed on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The first quarter is expected to have been the last with sound growth before the Russian economy took a hit from sweeping sanctions for Moscow's decision to send tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The European Union will not give a new mandate to renegotiate post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland agreed as part of the Brexit deal, the bloc's ambassador to London said on Thursday, Reuters reported. Britain is lining up a new law that would effectively override parts of a Brexit deal and has said that the bloc's refusal to budge on its negotiating mandate for the talks is "hugely disappointing". Speaking at an event in Westminster, the EU ambassador, João Vale de Almeida, said that the EU would stick to its existing mandate for the talks with Britain.

Too many global investment banks continue to serve euro zone clients out of London and the European Central Bank plans to force them to relocate senior staff and trading activity to the bloc, ECB supervisory chief Andrea Enria said on Thursday, Reuters reported. The ECB has long battled the industry's biggest players, who are reluctant to relocate activities after Brexit, despite explicit demands by the ECB, which supervises the bloc's biggest financial institutions.

Google’s Russian subsidiary plans to file for bankruptcy, Reuters reported. The U.S. tech firm said Wednesday (May 18) that Russian authorities had seized the unit's bank account. Alphabet’s Google has been under pressure in Russia for months as Moscow wanted it to delete content it viewed as illegal. It was also criticized in the country for restricting access to some Russian media on YouTube. The Kremlin has so far stopped short of blocking access to its platforms. Google said that by seizing its bank account authorities had made it impossible for its Russian office to function.

The U.K. is due to become the first big European economy to reach pre-pandemic levels of corporate insolvencies as crisis support is unwound and rising inflation threatens companies’ survival prospects, according to research, the London Times reported. Business insolvencies will rise by 37 per cent this year, Allianz Trade, a credit insurer, predicted. It cited as the main causes the withdrawal of Covid support schemes, rising commodity prices, supply chain problems, the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “lagging effects” of Brexit.

British inflation surged last month to its highest annual rate since 1982, pressuring finance minister Rishi Sunak to offer more help for households and the Bank of England to keep raising interest rates despite a risk of recession, Reuters reported. Consumer price inflation hit 9% in April, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday, surpassing the peaks of the early 1990s recession that many Britons remember for sky-high interest rates and widespread mortgage defaults.

Holiday group TUI on Tuesday unveiled a capital increase to pay back elements of a German state bailout that it had received during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Reuters reported. The company will issue up to 162,291,441 new shares, which, based on Tuesday's closing price of 2.89 euros apiece, would result in proceeds of up to 469 million euros ($494 million). TUI said that it planned to use the proceeds as well as existing cash resources to fully repay the second installment of a so-called silent participation of the German government in the order of 671 million euros.

European businesses in China are awaiting the next wave of disruption from COVID-19 outbreaks and see little chance of improvement until the country increases vaccination rates, the European Chamber of Commerce in China said on Monday, Reuters reported. Shanghai has set out plans to end its COVID lockdown that has lasted more than six weeks, hitting China's economy, where industrial output and retail sales fell in April at the fastest in more than two years, missing expectations.

Hungary told its European Union counterparts that it will cost at least 770 million euros ($810 million) to revamp its oil industry as they wrangle over potential sanctions that would target Russian supplies, Bloomberg News reported. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government said 550 million euros were needed to overhaul its refineries to comply with the ban, and another 220 million euros for a pipeline from Croatia, according to people familiar with discussions that have taken place this week between EU ministers and documents seen by Bloomberg.