The European Union and the United Kingdom made public Saturday the vast agreement that is likely to govern future trade and cooperation between them from Jan. 1, setting the 27-nation bloc’s relations with its former member country and neighbor on a new but far more distant footing, the Associated Press reported. EU ambassadors and lawmakers on both sides of the English Channel will now pore over the “EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement,” which contains over 1,240 pages of text. EU envoys are expected to meet on Monday to discuss the document, drawn up over nine intense months of talks.

Britain yesterday urged businesses to prepare for Brexit, just days before a transition period designed to smooth the UK’s departure from the European Union comes to an end, Reuters reported.Britain and the EU clinched a trade deal on Thursday - one which preserves zero-tariff and zero-quota access to the bloc’s single market but which will still cause disruption. The transition period, under which Britain stayed aligned to the EU’s trading and regulatory rules, ends at 2300 GMT on Dec. 31.

Montenegro Airlines has ceased operations this evening with the company to be shut down, ExyuAviation.com reported. The carrier's final commercial service was operated between Belgrade and Podgorica as flight YM103. In a statement, the airline said, "The Montenegrin government's decision to shut down our company will have a negative impact on the entire aviation sector in the country. We would like to inform the public that starting tomorrow, December 26, 2020, we are completely suspending all operations".

The High Court has appointed a provisional liquidator to an Irish-registered luxury property investment firm operated by an alleged fraudster, The Irish Times reported. The order was made in respect of Lux Estate Capital Limited, with a registered address at Townspark, Trim Road, Athboy, Co Meath, which purports to be involved in real estate investments in various countries, primarily in Spain. The court heard that the company was run and owned by a Polish national called Lukasz Salamander, aka Lukasz Salamandra.

The drop in the amount of distressed debt across emerging markets has been a barely anticipated bonus for many countries this year. But it’s scant comfort for those nations still struggling with mounting obligations, Bloomberg News reported. The number of emerging- and frontier-market nations with debt trading at distressed levels -- yields more than 10 percentage points above those on U.S. Treasuries -- has tumbled from as many as 19 at the height of the coronavirus selloff in March to about a half-dozen now.

The new mutation of COVID-19 risks increasing debt defaults among junk-rated companies next year above what was previously anticipated, Russell Investments’s global head of fixed income said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. A highly infectious new strain of the virus that has led much of the world to cut off travel ties to Britain could increase the U.S. high-yield bond default rate to 6%-8% in the next 12 months, compared to earlier expectations of 5%-8%, Gerard Fitzpatrick told Reuters.

Investors hope that for policymakers, 2021 will be the year of speaking carefully. Central banks and governments rode to the rescue of markets in 2020, blasting the financial system with cheap cash, liquidity and promises of long-term support on a huge scale, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. Fund managers were not always the direct target of that support, of course, but the effect is the same. The global financial system peered over the brink in March, and swiftly retreated.

An easyJet board member has resigned following scrutiny over her role at Wirecard, the collapsed German payments company. Anastassia Lauterbach quit on Monday as a non-executive director of the low-cost carrier with immediate effect after less than two years’ service, the Financial Times reported. Her exit came days after influential shareholder advisory group ISS questioned her place on the board, given that she had been a member of the supervisory board of Wirecard, the scandal-hit German company that filed for insolvency in June after revealing a multiyear frau

Indian stocks fell, taking a sudden plunge about one hour ahead of the close as investors assessed the latest coronavirus outbreaks as well as a new lockdown in the U.K, Bloomberg News reported. The S&P BSE Sensex closed down 3% to 45,553.96, the biggest decline since May, with all stocks in the red. Reliance Industries and utilities were the biggest contributor to the losses with the oil refiner down 2.6%. Meanwhile, a broader gauge of about 200 stocks that includes mid caps tumbled 3.4%, the most since May.

The High Court has made formal orders winding up four companies employing 487 people here that are part of the UK fashion group Arcadia, The Irish Times reported. The companies will continue to trade under the liquidators into the new year pending any disposal of the Arcadia group. Mr Justice Brian O’Moore, when making the winding-up orders on Monday and appointing joint liquidators, said this was “another sad milestone in the decline of bricks and mortar retailing in Ireland”.