British supermarket group Morrisons has agreed to an improved takeover offer worth 6.7 billion pounds ($9.3 billion) in cash from a consortium led by Fortress Investment Group, though its shares were trading above the level of the new bid, Reuters reported. That indicated investors were still hoping for a counter bid from U.S. private equity group Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R). Softbank-owned Fortress said its raised offer comprises 270 pence per Morrisons share plus a 2 pence a share special dividend and was aimed at warding off its rival suitor.

Prime minister Boris Johnson and chancellor Rishi Sunak have vowed to overhaul rules governing Britain's huge asset management industry to make it easier to firms to invest in the U.K., Yahoo News reported. The pair issued a rallying cry to Britain's investment industry on Wednesday night, calling for money managers to plough more cash into British businesses and assets. The prime minister and the chancellor sent an open letter to senior investment industry professionals, calling for an "investment Big Bang" to help drive the country's recovery from COVID.

After almost 18 months of relying on expensive emergency aid programs to support their economies through the pandemic, governments across Europe are scaling back some of these measures, counting on burgeoning economic growth and the power of vaccines to carry the load from here. But the insurgent spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus has thrown a new variable into that calculation, prompting concerns about whether this is the time for scheduled rollbacks in financial assistance, the New York Times reported.

Inflation in Britain will rise to an annual rate of 4 percent later this year, according to new projections by the Bank of England, a level that is double the central bank’s target and one that hasn’t been reached in a decade. But policymakers didn’t feel the need to immediately slow their efforts to stimulate the economy, the New York Times reported. They said that the increase in prices would be temporary and that inflation would return to its 2 percent target in 2023.

The Czech Republic’s central bank has increased its key interest rate by a quarter-point to 0.75% to tackle inflation amid the economy’s rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, the Associated Press reported. It was the second such increase in about two months. Analysts had predicted Thursday’s move, and a member of the bank’s board had indicated that the rate might be hiked further later in the year as the bank considers high inflation as a major threat.

Germany plans to introduce a waiver on bankruptcy filing for businesses affected by last month’s devastating floods, the Justice Ministry said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Parliament will have to approve the waiver, which expires at the end of October, in a vote. “We have to prevent a situation where businesses must file for bankruptcy simply because they could not access financial aid in time,” Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said in a statement. German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday that rebuilding would cost more than 6 billion euros ($7.11 billion).

Euro zone retail sales rose roughly in line with expectations in June though less steeply than in May, when consumers flocked back to shops after coronavirus restrictions were eased, Reuters reported. The European Union's statistics office Eurostat said on Wednesday that retail sales in the 19 countries sharing the euro rose 1.5% month-on-month in June and were 5.0% higher than a year earlier. Economists polled by Reuters had expected a 1.7% monthly rise and forecast a 4.5% year-on-year increase. The monthly increase was not uniform.

One of the major Romanian online retailers, CEL.ro, filed for insolvency after its turnover plunged somehow unexpectedly last year and its losses deepened, Romania-Insider.com reported. Corsar Online, the operator behind the online shop CEL, reported its revenues dwindled by 38% year-on-year to RON 127 mln (EUR 26 mln) last year - the year when the market was particularly favorable to the online electro-IT retailers like CEL.ro. The company’s losses quadrupled to RON 3.5 mln in 2020, though.

AIB has set aside €100 million to compensate investors affected by a failed series of boom-time UK commercial property funds, including clients who were not part of a settlement agreement with the lender last month after taking legal action, the Irish Times reported. The High Court was told on July 8th that AIB had settled 270 cases over investor losses from collapsed UK property funds, known as the Belfry Funds.

Shareholders in Mallinckrodt, the Dublin-based but U.S.-run drugmaker in the middle of a bankruptcy reorganization, are being urged by a leading corporate advisory firm to vote against some directors as a parting rebuke over its handling of the U.S. opioid crisis and executive pay, the Irish Times reported. Mallinckrodt filed for bankruptcy in Delaware last October as the company was overwhelmed by lawsuits accusing it of deceptively marketing opioids. The company is pursuing a U.S.