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.

Takeovers of British companies hit a 14-year high by value in the first seven months of 2021, Refinitiv data shows, with no sign the buying spree is slowing after U.S. companies targeted a leading supermarket and defence groups, Reuters reported. The total value of UK deals in the seven months was $198 billion, a more than threefold increase on the same period last year, which included the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Deals involving a British target totalled $34.9 billion in July, 5% less than June but more than seven times the value in July 2020.

The U.K. Department for Work and Pensions says lowering the age of entitlement would be "neither affordable nor fair," the BBC reported. More than 69,000 people have signed a Commons petition calling for a reduction to be introduced with immediate effect. Until 2010, the state pension age was 60 for women and 65 for men, but qualifying ages were brought in line for everyone by 2018 and have been rising since. In 2020, a further change to the rules required men and women born between 6 October, 1954, and 5 April, 1960, to have to wait until their 66th birthday to receive their pension.

Dielmar, a clothing company based in Alcains, in Portugal’s Castelo Branco district, with about 300 employees, has filed for insolvency after 56 years of the business, in a move that its board said was made necessary by the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, Macau Business reported. In a statement, the board states that “after having overcome several crises over 56 years” the company succumbed to the pandemic, as a result of “a set of situations that were lethal” for its business.

Britain opened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers from the U.S. and the European Union on Monday as travel industry leaders urged the government to further ease restrictions and allow people to enjoy the benefits of a successful COVID-19 inoculation program, the Associated Press reported. The new rules came into effect amid reports that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government may add a new category to Britain’s traffic light system of travel restrictions, a move industry officials say would make many people decide to stay home.

The euro zone economy grew faster than expected in the second quarter, pulling out of a pandemic-induced recession, while the easing of coronavirus curbs also helped inflation shoot past the European Central Bank's 2% target in July, Reuters reported. The European Union's statistics office Eurostat said on Friday that its initial estimate showed gross domestic product (GDP) in the 19 countries that use the euro had expanded 2.0% in April-June from the previous quarter.