Casual dining company The Restaurant Group is to shut 125 of its underperforming restaurants in a significant cut to the size of its estate, the Financial Times reported. The closure will largely impact its Frankie & Benny’s chain, and comes as the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns in the UK have deepened the crisis in the mid-market restaurant sector, forcing companies to reduce their cost base and downsize operations.

U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is being asked by members of the ruling Conservative Party to take his time to pay off the record debt the country is racking up as it tries to weather the coronavirus pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. By that, they mean decades. With the economy on course for its deepest recession for at least a century, the government is now paying the wages of more than 10 million workers to stave off mass unemployment.

British fashion retailers Monsoon and Accessorize will close 35 stores, make 545 staff redundant and seek rent cuts for remaining shops as part of a restructuring led by its founder to survive the COVID-19 crisis, Reuters reported. Administrators from business advisory firm FRP were appointed late on Tuesday and immediately sold the companies’ business and assets to Adena Brands, a company ultimately controlled by Peter Simon, who owned and founded Monsoon in 1973. The coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent national lockdown had made the business unviable.

Brussels will need to tackle Europe’s fragmented insolvency laws and create more uniform shareholder rights if it wants to build deeper capital markets and speed up its economic recovery, an official expert group has warned, the Financial Times reported. The group, led by former eurogroup chief official Thomas Wieser, said on Wednesday that previous EU attempts to build a unified capital market through legislation had fallen short, while Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic had made the project more urgent.

Finland’s rapid recovery from the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus looks unlikely, but the worst-case scenarios have so far been avoided, Bank of Finland governor Olli Rehn said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The bank believes Finland’s gross domestic product will contract around 7% this year and grow around 3% in 2021 and 2022, but said GDP contraction could be as little as 5% or as much as 11% in 2020 in alternative scenarios. “Finland has not experienced a sizeable wave of bankruptcies.

British businesses have borrowed nearly 35 billion pounds under three emergency credit programmes for companies hit by the coronavirus crisis with demand strongest for a 100% state-backed scheme for the smallest firms, Reuters reported. After a recent warning by lenders that some of the borrowing might prove unsustainable for companies hit by the COVID lockdown, the Treasury said total lending under the Bounce Back Loan Scheme (BBLS) rose to 23.8 billion pounds by June 7 from 21.3 billion pounds by May 31. That represented a slightly smaller increase than in the previous week.

Eurobank has moved ahead of Greek peers in the drive to cut bad loan volumes after completing a deal with Italian debt recovery firm doValue, and is now focused on boosting lending, its chief executive told Reuters on Tuesday. Greek banks have been making headway in their bid to sell, write off or restructure billions of euros of soured loans accumulated during the last financial crisis, Reuters reported. The high level of non-performing exposures (NPEs) - about 40% of their loanbooks in March - constrains their ability to finance the country’s economic recovery.

France has unveiled a €15bn support plan for the aerospace industry, warning that 100,000 jobs in the sector are on the line after the Covid-19 pandemic led to worldwide border closures and travel curbs, the Financial Times reported.

The head of the International Monetary Fund called on private creditors to join the Group of 20 in providing debt relief for the world’s poorest nations, saying that the alternative to suspension and restructuring is defaults, Bloomberg News reported. A debt-service suspension would provide time for restructuring debt on a case-by-case basis in countries where debt sustainability needs to be restored, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a webcast with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Tuesday.

France’s “temporary unemployment” scheme to avert mass bankruptcies and lay-offs as a result of the coronavirus crisis will be extended, and is now expected to last up to two years, the country’s labour minister said, the Financial Times reported.