Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said on Monday that the rise of crypto assets was helping illegal activity, Reuters reported. "I'm afraid that the advent of digital means of payment, and in particular crypto assets, I'm afraid that the evidence suggests, and we see this, is that it is providing another means of payment for people who want to conduct criminal activity," Bailey said during an online question-and-answer session organised by the BoE. Read more.

Russia succeeded in overturning part of a judgment for a record $50 billion to former shareholders of Yukos Oil Co., meaning the 16-year legal saga that raged between the Kremlin and the owners of what was once Russia’s biggest oil company is set to continue, Bloomberg News reported. The ruling by the Netherlands’ highest court Friday overturned a prior opinion into the bankruptcy of Yukos. The Dutch Supreme Court said in a judgment that a lower court should review one ground of the case again.

Housing costs may be adding more to euro zone inflation than once thought, European Central Bank policymaker Robert Holzmann said on Friday, weighing in on a key issue that has been a focus of policymakers this year, Reuters reported. When asked how much owner-occupied housing costs could increase headline inflation, Holzmann, Austria's central bank chief, said it could raise it by as much as a 0.5 percentage point. "I have heard 0.5 (percentage point), he told reporters.

Euro zone retail sales recorded an unexpected drop in September as Germany, the bloc's biggest economy, underperformed and non-food sales were also weak, data from Eurostat showed on Friday. Retail sales, a proxy for consumer demand, in the 19 countries sharing the euro, fell 0.3% month-on-month in September and were up 2.5% from a year earlier, the European Union's statistics office said.

The Biden administration’s deal to ease off steel and aluminum tariffs from Europe has won plaudits from much of U.S. industry, but a complex new quota system that comes with it has fueled concerns for small importers, the Wall Street Journal reported. The deal, announced during the Group of 20 summit last weekend, allows the European Union to export steel and aluminum duty free until reaching a quota of 3.3 million metric tons of steel and 384,000 metric tons of aluminum a year.

The Irish High Court has approved a personal insolvency arrangement (PIA) allowing a woman to write off approximately €4.2m in debt owed to financial institutions, the Independent reported. Mr. Justice Mark Sanfey approved the PIA for 54-year-old Assumpta Gaffney, an accounts administrator with a construction firm, who is married with two dependent children. Under the terms of the PIA, Mrs. Gaffney will retain her family home at Mountain Lodge, Ballyleigh, Waterfall, Co Cork, for which she will continue to make mortgage repayments.

Covid support measures from the U.K. government were so speedily introduced that they created a fertile breeding ground for wrongdoing. Now, with schemes closed and reports last week indicating that a third of small businesses are “highly indebted”, we may begin to see much crime exposed as a result of insolvency, according to a commentary in The Times. Dealing with the fallout of this effectively and fairly is an immense and multifaceted task. In some cases, the solution is clear-cut; in others, the courts may be asked to stretch existing principles of law.

The Bank of England’s decision Thursday not to raise interest rates sent bond markets into a tizzy, leading to the biggest moves in U.K. bond yields in years, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bank has said that it expects to raise borrowing costs soon, moving ahead of the Federal Reserve and other major central banks in withdrawing stimulus to tame inflation. But the bank held fire Thursday, surprising investors who had become convinced an increase was coming.

The Czech Republic’s central bank has again sharply increased its key interest rate by a point and a quarter to 2.75%, to tackle soaring inflation amid the economy’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, the Associated Press reported. Thursday’s surprising move was the biggest single hike of the rate since 1997 and the fourth straight increase since June. Inflation jumped to 4.9% in September, well above the bank’s 2% target. The last time the bank changed its rates was Sept 30, when it increased the key interest rate by three quarters of a point to 1.5% in an effort to tame inflation.

Airline Avianca Holdings will move its domicile to the United Kingdom and its stock will no longer be traded on the Colombian stock exchange, the company said on Wednesday, a day after a U.S. court's approval of the company's restructuring plan, Reuters reported. Colombia's flag carrier had filed for chapter 11 protection at a U.S. court in New York in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic. It now expects to exit the measure by the end 2021, after receiving around $2 billion in new financing under a debt-for-equity deal.