At the Whitchurch Care Home, emergency buzzers went unanswered, some medicines were not dispensed and many of its frail and elderly residents had not been given a bath, shower or a wash for a month, an official inspector’s report found, the Financial Times reported. A broken elevator meant residents on the second floor could not be taken to hospital appointments. The dismal conditions at the care home in Bristol, south-west England, found in January last year, were a sign of the financial pressures on its manager Four Seasons, Britain’s second-largest care home provider.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, the state-rescued Italian bank, missed income targets set out in its restructuring plan, which may force the bank to cut an additional 100 million euros ($110 million) of costs, Bloomberg News reported. The Siena-based bank swung to a fourth-quarter loss after it wrote down 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) of deferred tax assets to comply with changes in Italy’s 2020 budget law, it said in a statement on Friday. Net operating income, which excludes the writedowns, totaled 23 million euros on higher revenue and cost reductions.

European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde has warned that the world's central banks have less room to stimulate the economy in case there's a recession, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. Lagarde said in an appearance Thursday before the European Parliament's economic and monetary affairs committee that interest rates and inflation are already low, meaning there is less room to reduce rates further and make credit cheaper to support business activity.

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.