Bank of England interest-rate setter Jonathan Haskel said he was worried that Britain’s economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis could be slow and it would depend heavily on whether people felt confident that it was safe to go out, Reuters reported. Haskel, who backed the BoE’s latest 100 billion-pound expansion of asset purchases last month, also warned that unemployment had the potential to be worse than during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Ardagh Group, the glass and metal containers group led by Dublin financier Paul Coulson, swung into a loss in the three months to the end of June as its sales fell amid the Covid-19 pandemic and it booked one-off expenses relating to a refinancing of some of it debt, The Irish Times reported. The New York-listed company reported a net loss of $64 million (€55.3m ) for the period, compared to a $69 million profit for the same three months last year. Sales dipped by 6 per cent during the second quarter to $1.61 million.

UniCredit has sold non-performing loans worth €1.54bn in an effort to reduce its exposure to bad debt, as banks come under pressure to clean up their balance sheets in anticipation of a wave of defaults related to Covid-19, the Financial Times reported. Italy’s largest lender by assets said that the two portfolios of non-performing unsecured loans — made to small and medium-sized enterprises and worth €702m and €840m — had been bought by digital bank illimity, Banca Ifis and a securitisation vehicle managed by digital bank Guber Banca and Barclays.

Hospital operator NMC Health is looking to raise up to $250 million in debt while it prepares for insolvency proceedings in the United Arab Emirates and has picked Perella Weinberg Partners to advise it on the process, sources said, Reuters reported. The company, run by administrators Alvarez & Marsal, has also tasked Perella to advise it on the sale of UK-based Aspen Healthcare, a company it acquired in 2018, the two sources familiar with the matter said.

British Steel’s Chinese owner has had its bid to acquire a factory in France rejected by a court as concerns grow in some European capitals about companies from the Asian superpower snapping up assets, the Financial Times reported. Jingye Group, which saved the UK’s second-largest steelmaker from bankruptcy earlier this year, was attempting to wrest control of a small mill in north-east France that belonged to British Steel.

Eurozone consumer sentiment has ebbed slightly after a brief recovery from the sharp economic downturn caused by the pandemic, fuelling economists’ fears that the pace of the rebound has begun to slow, the Financial Times reported. The European Commission’s headline consumer sentiment indicator fell to minus 15 in July, below its minus 14.7 reading in June and well below the consensus expectation of minus 12 among economists polled by Reuters.

The number of people going financially insolvent is poised to spike in the run-up to Christmas as businesses fail and unpaid debts mount up, a survey of experts suggests, the Evening Express reported. The majority of personal insolvency experts who think there will be an increase in cases in the coming year think the spike will happen towards the end of 2020, although a significant proportion predict it will be in early 2021, according to the findings from insolvency and restructuring trade body R3.

A subsidiary of AIM-listed RBG Holdings plc, a professional services group, LionFish announced this week the launch of ISLERO, which it claimed will be able to offer cheaper and more flexible pricing structures, including some rate-based alternatives, Credit Strategy reported. LionFish said ISLERO will adopt the same principles that underpin LionFish’s overall litigation financing activities.

Board chairman of New Stream oil and gas company and former co-owner of troubled Antipinsky refinery Dmitry Mazurov charged with a 4 billion-ruble embezzlement (about $60 million) has filed a cassation appeal against a ruling declaring him bankrupt, according to the Moscow Commercial Court’s records, RAPSI reported. In mid-June, the Ninth Commercial Court of Appeals declared Mazurov. The ruling was delivered upon an application filed by Persit Services Inc.  Its 2.08-billion-ruble claim was included in Mazurov’s creditor demands list.

The extent of the coronavirus toll on the UK public finances was exposed on Tuesday with official figures showing a record government cash deficit in the first quarter of the financial year, more than twice the previous highest level of borrowing, the Financial Times reported. Between April and June, the government’s net cash requirement — the deficit of tax receipts over public spending — was £174bn, far higher than both the £20.3bn in the same period of 2019-20 and the previous quarterly record of £76.8bn at the height of the global financial crisis in the fourth quarter of 2009.