Britain's finance ministry set out plans on Tuesday to make the country's capital market more competitive by exploiting Brexit "freedoms" to cut unnecessary red tape in trading, Reuters reported. Britain left the European Union's orbit at the end of 2020, leaving the financial sector largely cut off from the bloc and swathes of euro stock and derivatives trading shifted from London to Amsterdam. The ministry said it would remove restrictions on how banks and brokers execute transactions to ensure that market participants can get the best outcomes for investors.

Telecom Italia SpA is seeking to get KKR & Co. to scrap a 10.8 billion-euro ($12.1 billion) takeover bid for the company by involving the U.S. private equity giant in an in-house plan to spin off its landline network, Bloomberg News reported. The phone carrier, which has internally valued the bid as too low and lacking enough value-creation, instead wants to involve KKR in a plan to spin the landline network off into a new unit called NetCo. The counter-proposal would still allow KKR to strengthen its grip over Telecom Italia’s landline network once it’s separated, the people said.

The presidents of eight central and eastern European nations on Monday called on European Union member states to immediately grant Ukraine a EU candidate country status and open membership talks according to an open letter published on Monday, Reuters reported.

Russia's central bank more than doubled its key policy rate on Monday and introduced some capital controls as the country faced deepening economic isolation, but its governor said that sanctions had stopped it selling foreign currency to prop up the rouble, Reuters reported. The admission that restrictions had effectively tied the Bank of Russia’s hands underscores the ferocity of the backlash to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and Western allies' success in restricting its ability to deploy some $640 billion of foreign exchange and gold reserves.

The European arm of Sberbank (SBER.MM), Russia's biggest lender, faces failure, the European Central Bank (ECB) warned on Monday, after a run on its deposits sparked by the backlash from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reported. Western allies have taken unprecedented steps to isolate Russia's economy and financial system, including sanctioning its central bank and excluding some of its lenders from the SWIFT messaging system, used for trillions' of dollars of transactions.

Lessors are set to terminate hundreds of aircraft leases with Russian airlines following Western sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine that require the contracts be cancelled, Reuters reported. AerCap Holdings, the world's biggest leasing company, said on Monday that it would cease leasing activity with Russian airlines, while BOC Aviation said that most of its leases in Russia would now have to be terminated by March 28. Russia warned the West it would retaliate against sanctions targeting its aviation industry.

With Covid shutting off tourism from much of the West, Russia and Ukraine had become an increasingly important source of foreign currency for Sri Lanka. The conflict threatens to turn off that tap as key bond repayments come due, Bloomberg News reported. Almost a quarter of all tourist arrivals into Sri Lanka this year were from Russia and Ukraine -- rising to 30% if you include Poland and Belarus, official data show. Russia, which was the third-biggest buyer of Sri Lankan tea over the past two years, rose to second place in January.

The impact of a euro-zone interest-rate hike would be quickly felt by Portuguese companies and families, according to the country’s central bank governor, Bloomberg News reported. “The structure of credit in Portugal is dominated by variable interest rates, so transmission of interest rates to funding costs, both for households and firms, will be very fast,” Mario Centeno, a member of the European Central Bank’s Governing Council, said in an interview in Lisbon on Monday. “So we need to be prepared for that.” Centeno also said that Portugal has a “very low” exposure to Russia.

U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said on Friday that more than $1 billion will be needed for aid operations in Ukraine over the next three months as hundreds of thousands of people are on the move after Russia invaded its neighbor, Reuters reported. "We're going to need to use cash for the delivery of assistance, and we're going to need to use that cash safely. We're looking obviously at the impact of sanctions on our operations," he told reporters. Read more.