The head of Monte dei Paschi di Siena Marco Morelli will leave in April after steering the state-owned Italian bank through a painful restructuring, adding to uncertainty as Italy’s Treasury prepares its exit strategy, Reuters reported. Morelli’s departure, announced by the bank late on Thursday, adds to the question marks hanging over the world’s oldest bank, which was taken over by the Italian government in 2017 in an 8 billion euro ($8.6 billion) bailout to stop it from buckling under a pile of bad loans after years of mismanagement.

Telefónica posted a net loss for the fourth quarter, as restructuring costs and impairments from Mexico and Argentina underscored the challenges the company faces as its overhauls its business and reorients its strategy in Latin America, the Financial Times reported. The Spanish telecoms company said that revenues during the quarter dipped 4 per cent to €12.4bn, slightly beating the €12.38bn expected by analysts polled by Bloomberg. The fourth quarter net loss of €202m fell short of analyst expectations of a €715.7m net profit.

India’s shadow banking crisis and revitalized bankruptcy process are creating new opportunities for Deutsche Bank AG as it steps up lending to cash-strapped tycoons and for purchases of distressed assets, Bloomberg News reported. The German lender is seeing three times the volume of financing deals compared with 2018, when the shadow banking problems erupted, according to Rahul Chawla, the head of global credit trading at Deutsche Bank’s India unit.

Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s biggest domestic lender, has launched a €4.86bn ($5.26bn) takeover bid for its rival UBI Banca in an audacious attempt to kick-start consolidation in Italy's fragmented banking sector, the Financial Times reported. Just before midnight on Monday local time, Intesa, based in Turin, unveiled an all-share offer to buy Italy’s fourth-biggest lender through notices detailing its plans to issue new shares to fund the deal. If successful, the combination would create the seventh-largest bank in the eurozone with €1.1tn in assets.

HSBC has said it plans to slash about 35,000 jobs as part of a radical downsizing of its operations in Europe and the US, as it warned of the threat to its business from social unrest in Hong Kong and the coronavirus outbreak, the Financial Times reported. The London-based bank said it aimed to cut annual costs by $4.5bn and shed $100bn of assets adjusted for risk by the end of 2022 as it attempts its most drastic overhaul since the financial crisis in an attempt to kick-start its stuttering business. The bank did not publish a headcount reduction targ

Investor sentiment in Germany dropped sharply in February as the effects of the coronavirus outbreak weighed on exporters, a survey revealed, adding to an increasingly gloomy picture for Europe’s biggest economy, the Financial Times reported. The Zew survey of financial market experts found that sentiment about the outlook for the German economy fell 18 points this month to a reading of 8.7. This is well below January’s score of 26.7 and significantly worse than the 21.5 economists in a Reuters poll had been expecting.

UK steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta has completed the acquisition of a bankrupt Indian steelmaker after a long court battle, the first foray by his GFG Alliance into the country’s fast-growing market following previous failed attempts, the Financial Times reported.

More than 7m Britons are struggling with debt and are at risk of being exploited by some lenders’ business models, according to a new assessment of potential harm to consumers by the UK financial watchdog, the Financial Times reported. The Financial Conduct Authority on Tuesday listed the treatment of over-indebted borrowers, unsuitable pension transfers, and the marketing of high risk investment products as among the greatest risks posed by the financial services industry in 2020.

Renault has been punished for its weak full-year results last week with a downgrade of its credit rating into junk territory by Moody’s, the rating agency, the Financial Times reported. The downgrade of the French carmaker’s debt to Ba1, just below investment grade, “was triggered by Renault’s substantially weakened operating performance reported for the year 2019”, said Moody’s in a statement on Tuesday evening.

Sirius Minerals said on Friday talks with a consortium of financial investors on an alternate debt financing proposal to raise $680 million has fallen through, putting the company at the risk of going under administration or liquidation, Reuters reported. “The board confirms that the company has not been able to secure an institutional anchor investor willing to provide sufficient support for the alternative proposal which was part of the consortium’s requirements,” Sirius said in a statement.