Italy’s biggest bank UniCredit on Thursday posted a lower-than-expected fourth quarter net loss driven by one-off costs and writedowns of problem loans, while meeting its full-year underlying net profit target, Reuters reported. UniCredit has undergone a major restructuring in the past three years under French boss Jean Pierre Mustier, who has slashed costs, dumped bad debts and sold assets, shrinking the bank’s international presence.

German pharma company Aenova is being overhauled by owner BC Partners, which is placing a new capital structure to strengthen the company and increase investor confidence, banking sources said, Reuters reported. Aenova returned to Europe’s leveraged loan market for the first time in 5.5 years, launching a €440m term loan B on February 3 to refinance some of its existing debt. In addition to the new term loan, BC Partners is also injecting €100m of new equity into Aenova and has also raised €100m of subordinated, preplaced PIK.

A sharp fall in German factory orders has confounded hopes of a rebound in the eurozone economy as the head of the European Central Bank warned that it had limited scope to cut interest rates further, the Financial Times reported. Christine Lagarde said on Thursday that the low rates, low inflation and low growth environment in the eurozone had “significantly reduced the scope for the ECB and other central banks worldwide to ease monetary policy” if another crisis was to strike.

Problems that forced two Irish property investment funds to temporarily bar investors from withdrawing their cash could spread to other such companies, credit analysts warned on Wednesday. Aviva Irish Property Fund and Friends First Irish Commercial Property Fund, which hold assets totalling €940 million, recently froze withdrawals for up to six months after they were unable to meet investors’ demands for the return of their cash, The Irish Times reported.

In a related story, the Financial Times reported that Spain’s central bank chief has warned its new leftwing government not to scrap a landmark labour reform that economists say is crucial to the country’s recovery. Pablo Hernández de Cos told the Financial Times that Spain’s competitiveness could be hit by moves such as a shift from company-level to sector-wide bargaining over wages and conditions — a priority for the ruling coalition. “The Spanish economy still needs to keep its competitiveness at a high level,” Mr Hernández de Cos said in an interview.

Brussels has admitted that its contentious budget rules for member states need an overhaul, with even EU finance ministries struggling to understand how to comply, the Financial Times reported. The rules are part of a “stability and growth pact” supposed to set limits on eurozone member states’ debt burden and budget deficits. But the European Commission on Wednesday acknowledged that the metrics used in its calculations were hard to quantify and open to dispute.

The Finnish government will on Thursday give the green light for Terrafame to start mining and refining uranium at an existing mine in eastern Finland, a government source told Reuters on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The permit will allow Terrafame, which is majority state-owned, to become the first miner to extract uranium on a commercial scale in Finland. Terrafame took over the nickel mine, previously known as Talvivaara, in the Kainuu region back in 2015, after environmental hurdles had led it to file for bankruptcy.

Germany’s government has proposed a clampdown on anti-competitive behaviour by digital platforms, putting Berlin in the vanguard of European efforts to regulate companies including Google and Amazon, the Financial Times reported. The draft “digital law” will strengthen the intervention powers of Germany’s competition watchdog, the Federal Cartel Office. Peter Altmaier, the economy minister, said the measures would “toughen control of abusive practices for big market-dominating digital companies”.

Dublin-based Depfa Bank’s weakness as a “structurally lossmaking” business has been highlighted by two debt-ratings firms as the German government pursues a second attempt to sell the company, The Irish Times reported. “Given that Depfa’s recurring revenue is insufficient to cover its cost base, we believe that – without outside assistance – Depfa has limited scope to engineer a sustainable turnaround and will therefore likely remain lossmaking in the medium to long term, although there may be potential to reduce losses,” Moody’s said in a note published last week.

Developer Sean Dunne’s latest court filing is “a baseless ploy” aimed at sinking settlement of his long-running US bankruptcy case, and he should be sanctioned for it, his bankruptcy trustee says in court papers filed Monday, The Irish Times reported. “Your client is intentionally interfering with the trustee’s attempt to liquidate his judgment, which is based on your client’s actual fraud,” wrote trustee attorney Timothy Miltenberger in an angry letter to Mr Dunne’s lawyer, Luke McGrath. The letter was included as an attachment to the trustee’s motion to intervene in the case.