PizzaExpress bondholders have warned the restaurant chain that its future is at risk, urging its Chinese owners to work with them on a financial restructuring, the Financial Times reported. A group of investors who own almost 70 per cent of the £465m of senior secured bonds told the board they were willing to provide extra money to secure the business, said two people with familiar with the situation.Their letter asked management to move quickly to restructure the group’s debt-laden balance sheet. Analysts from S&P on Monday said that a “distressed exchange or a debt re

British nursery retailer Mamas & Papas Retail was sold to private equity firm Bluegem Capital Partners, administrator Deloitte said on Friday, leading to the shutdown of six loss-making stores and 73 job losses, Reuters reported. The news comes three days after baby products retailer Mothercare said it would shut all its British stores. Mamas & Papas sells pushchairs, car seats, furniture, clothing and other nursery products.

British budget airlines easyJet and Jet2.com have bought the take-off and landing slots of failed travel company Thomas Cook at London Gatwick and Manchester airports, respectively, Reuters reported. Thomas Cook’s UK business and airline went into immediate insolvency when the company collapsed in September, and a court appointed an official receiver to liquidate its assets.

Greece has lost the dubious distinction of being the riskiest government borrower in the eurozone after its bond yields dipped below Italy’s for the first time since 2008, the Financial Times reported. Greek bonds have staged a powerful rally this year as investors hungry for yields have snapped up debt from former euro area crisis spots — a trend that gained further momentum after Standard & Poor’s upgraded Athens’ credit rating to BB- late last month.

United Group, the private-equity backed cable company, has struck a €1.2bn deal to acquire Bulgaria’s former state owned telecoms operator Vivacom, the Financial Times reported. The sale is one of the largest deals struck by United, owned by BC Partners, to consolidate the Balkan media and communications industry. It agreed to buy Tele2 Croatia for €220m in May and has so far rolled up about 100 Balkan businesses. It comes in spite of a long-running ownership dispute around Vivacom, which is still rumbling through the courts.

Brussels has cut its growth forecasts for the eurozone to their lowest level since the height of the bloc’s sovereign debt crisis, warning the slowdown will persist for at least the next two years, the Financial Times reported. The European Commission on Thursday reduced its annual projection for eurozone GDP growth to 1.1 per cent in 2019 — down 0.1 percentage point from its last forecast and marking the lowest annual expansion since 2014.

Bribe allegations leveled in court against a VTB Group executive may complicate the Russian state-owned bank’s attempts to recoup a $535 million loan that’s part of a major debt scandal in Mozambique, Bloomberg News reported. A New York court heard testimony last month that the VTB executive in charge of the deal, Makram Abboud, took $2 million in kickbacks. The bank denies the allegations, made by a former Credit Suisse Group AG banker at a criminal trial in which VTB isn’t a party, and its employee hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing.

TVT Media, a London-headquartered provider of media localization and end-to-end content services, filed for insolvency on October 21, 2019, according to regulatory filings, Slator reported. TVT’s operations in the UK generated revenues of nearly GBP 10m (USD 12.6m) in 2017 (the most recent year for which numbers are available), but the company’s global size is likely a multiple of the figure given that it operates large subsidiaries in the US, the Netherlands, Poland, Australia, Singapore, and Japan.

Italy has warned that a German proposal to complete the EU’s banking union would harm the competitiveness of the bloc’s banks, in comments heralding complex negotiations over Europe’s most ambitious integration project since the creation of the single currency, the Financial Times reported. Speaking on the margins of a gathering of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels, Roberto Gualtieri took issue with a key part of bank regulation plans laid out by his German counterpart this week in the Financial Times.

Komercni Banka on Wednesday posted an 8.5% drop in third-quarter net profit, in line with estimates as financial operations income fell and the Czech lender did not see a net release of bad loan provisions as in previous quarters, Reuters reported. Attributable net profit came in at 3.85 billion crowns ($167.25 million), versus the average estimate of 3.88 billion in a Reuters poll. The bank, 60% owned by France’s Societe Generale, boosted net interest income and net fees by 2.1% and 1.2% year-on-year respectively.