Treasury plans to prioritise debt repayments to the government in company insolvencies represents a “cash grab” that will have “serious consequences” for the economy, industry bodies have warned, The Times reported. In a joint letter to Sajid Javid, the chancellor, accountancy, investment and legal trade groups said that the proposed legislation would make it harder to rescue businesses, limit access to finance across the economy, increase the impact of insolvencies on other businesses and undermine government tax receipts.

Southern Italy has the worst graduate employment rates in the EU, according to new data published on Thursday which highlighted the impoverished region’s economic dysfunction, the Financial Times reported. Only one in three recent graduates is in employment in the area, less than half the EU average and the worst of any region in the bloc, including the poorest parts of Greece and Spain.

A Latvian court declared the country’s sixth-biggest lender insolvent, sealing the demise of the last bank to level accusations in a high-level corruption scandal, Bloomberg News reported. The decision, which Latvia’s Financial and Capital Market Commission said was taken on Thursday, comes almost a month after AS PNB Banka became one of only a handful of lenders declared by the European Central Bank to be “failing or likely to fail” because of insufficient capital. It joins Banco Popular Espanol SA, Banca Popolare di Vicenza SpA, Veneto Banca SpA and ABLV Bank AS.

Nearly 10m households in the UK are paying their energy bills via standard variable tariffs. These are the rates customers default to when any special energy deal runs out and are usually the most expensive around, the Financial Times reported. A customer could be put on a standard variable tariff if their fixed-term tariff contract ends and they have not chosen a new one; this usually occurs after around a year. The average price of a standard variable tariff from the largest six suppliers for a typical dual fuel customer is £104.50 a month, or £1,254 a year.

Losses at Topshop, once considered the jewel in the crown of Philip Green’s Arcadia group, widened to £498m for the year to September 2018 after taking significant exceptional charges relating to property leases and brand value, the Financial Times reported. The company accounts for around half of Arcadia’s overall sales and along with six other group entities has used insolvency procedures to secure lower rents at many of its UK stores. Topshop’s loss in the previous year was £15.6m.

Telecom Italia SpA Chairman Fulvio Conti is planning to resign in a move that signals the battle for influence between two of the phone carrier’s largest investors may be nearing an end, according to people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg News reported. Fulvio Conti, 71, was appointed as chairman last year in a list proposed by Elliott Management Corp. as part of a board reshuffle won by the U.S. activist investor against the French media-conglomerate Vivendi SA. Conti’s resignation hasn’t been finalized and is expected to be discussed at a Sept. 26 board meeting, the people said.

Italy’s prime minister has called on Brussels to allow Rome “a little bit of time” to cut its debt by investing in economic growth, in his first meeting with the incoming president of the European Commission, the Financial Times reported. Giuseppe Conte, who was this week sworn in by lawmakers as the leader of Italy’s new coalition government, said that he would not pursue policies that would risk financial stability after a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday with Ursula von der Leyen, the commission’s incoming head.

Concerns over PPI, which was supposed to protect customers if they fell ill or lost their jobs, first surfaced more than two decades ago. But the unprecedented scale of what has become by far the UK’s biggest mis-selling scandal has not lost its power to shock, The Irish Times reported. A flood of last-minute claims was widely expected before an August 29th deadline, but the scale of the rush has been little short of astonishing.

Billionaire Mike Ashley failed to appoint an auditor in time for Sports Direct’s annual general meeting on Wednesday, throwing the UK retailer deeper into chaos, The Irish Times reported. Sports Direct has been racing to find a replacement for Grant Thornton, which quit as auditor last month following the company’s delayed posting of annual results because of a last-minute €674 million tax bill. The big four auditing firms have turned down the role, citing conflicts of interest.

With the evolution of economies over time, there are some countries for whom cutting interest rates from already very low levels is likely to suppress, rather than stimulate, demand. This is now the case for major developed nations. The latest round of monetary easing, likely to continue with the European Central Bank on Thursday and the Federal Reserve next week, may make the global economy weaker rather than stronger, the Financial Times reported.