However much Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he will be able to arrange a trade deal with the European Union by the year-end, firms in Britain are already bracing themselves for the possibility he won’t, Bloomberg News reported. Renold Plc, a Manchester-based maker of vehicle chains and gearboxes, is among them. It’s planning to fast-track deliveries to customers in the coming months to ensure they aren’t caught up in any potential border disruption due to Brexit in January, according to Chief Executive Officer Robert Purcell.

Russia’s $1.6 trillion economy is going to be dealt another blow when a moratorium is lifted on companies filing for bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. The measure, which was a condition of government pandemic support, helped protect healthy businesses from creditors but left those that won’t survive limping along as zombies. It expires in October. “It’s like a life-support machine for companies -- if there isn’t treatment, they will just die when it’s switched off,” said Yuriy Khalimovsky, a director at Deloitte’s legal service in St. Petersburg.

UK shopping centre owner Intu has entered administration, becoming the latest casualty of a coronavirus pandemic that has inflicted severe pain on the country’s struggling retail sector, the Financial Times reported. The company, whose malls include the Trafford Centre in Manchester and Lakeside in Essex, had sought breathing space on its debts from lenders but said in a statement on Friday that “insufficient alignment and agreement has been achieved on such terms”. KPMG has been appointed to oversee the administration.

Europe’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is well under way, according to sentiment indicators, high-frequency measures and hard data — but activity remains far below normal levels, suggesting that the recovery from recession will be a struggle, the Financial Times reported. The continent’s workers and consumers began to return to work, shopping and dining out from last month onwards, generating an initial post-lockdown rebound.

Deutsche Lufthansa AG dodged insolvency. Now Europe’s biggest airline faces the arduous task of transforming itself into a leaner carrier to compete in an air-travel market hamstrung by the coronavirus, Bloomberg News reported. The approval of a 9 billion-euro ($10.1 billion) German bailout concludes weeks of sometimes rancorous negotiations with the government and follows frenzied speculation in recent days over whether billionaire Heinz Hermann Thiele, Lufthansa’s largest shareholder, would scupper the deal. Instead, he backed it.

The German government plans to terminate its contract with the country’s accounting watchdog after payments company Wirecard filed for insolvency last week in one of Germany’s biggest fraud scandals, a government official said on Sunday, Reuters reported. Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported earlier on Sunday that the Justice and Finance Ministries would on Monday cut ties with the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel (FREP), a quasi-private entity that supervises the financial statements of listed firms.

Non-Standard Finance on Thursday raised doubts on its ability to continue as a going concern, with the coronavirus crisis halting lending and making matters worse for the British lender that was just coming off a failed attempt to buy rival Provident Financial Plc, Reuters reported. “The last 18 months have been difficult and disappointing for Non-Standard Finance with the failure of our offer for Provident Financial,” Chief Executive Officer John van Kuffeler said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic led to large write-downs in the company’s businesses.

The Spanish government has agreed to extend the country’s emergency paid leave schemes for an additional three months to the end of September — a costly measure that business and unions say is essential to prevent the widespread collapse of companies and job destruction, the Financial Times reported. The temporary schemes, known as ERTEs, had been due to expire on June 30 and currently cover more than 2m people who hope to return to their jobs as the crisis eases but who are far from sure of doing so.

Wirecard collapsed on Thursday owing creditors almost $4 billion after disclosing a gaping hole in its books that its auditor EY said was the result of a sophisticated global fraud, Reuters reported. The payments company filed for insolvency at a Munich court saying that, with 1.3 billion euros ($1.5 billion) of loans due within a week its survival as a going concern was “not assured”.

Fitch Ratings treats some amend and extend (A&E) exercises initiated by stressed corporate borrowers as distressed debt exchanges (DDEs), eventually leading to restricted defaults (RDs), Fitch Ratings reported. Since the coronavirus pandemic began affecting Europe in March 2020, Fitch has classified 11 transactions in its EMEA bond and loan portfolio as DDEs, which will contribute to default rates rising towards 4%-5% by end-2020 from 1% in 2019.