MPs have accused PwC of “milking the cash cow dry” after it was revealed it is charging £44.2m for one year’s work as special managers on the administration of Carillion. The construction company collapsed last year with £7bn in liabilities. Frank Field, chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, and Rachel Reeves, chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, shared letters they exchanged with the Insolvency Service that revealed the fee total.

Italy’s populist government launched an unprecedented attack on the country’s central bank over the weekend, saying its top brass should be replaced because it had failed to supervise effectively the country’s troubled banking sector, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The wariness descending over leading central banks is a jarring contrast to the buoyant mood this time last year, the Financial Times reported. At the gathering of business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland in January 2018, optimism was simmering, with one survey of bosses putting confidence at its highest for six years. The IMF hailed the broadest synchronised global upsurge since the start of the decade, with 120 economies enjoying a pick-up in growth. That picture has now darkened.

Britain’s Sports Direct Plc has pulled its offer to buy Patisserie Holdings Plc after just two days, the Financial Times reported. In a letter on Sunday, Sports Direct wrote to cafe chain Patisserie Valerie’s administrators, KPMG, complaining it lacked the information required to continue bidding for the group, the FT said.

Eurozone banks are set to be tested on how many days they can last without a fresh injection of liquidity, under a new exercise designed by the region’s financial supervisor, the Financial Times reported. The European Central Bank, which supervises the eurozone’s largest lenders through its Single Supervisory Mechanism arm, said on Wednesday that it would launch a “sensitivity analysis” to judge how banks would handle an “adverse and extreme shock” to liquidity.

Italy is just the latest major borrower to benefit from searing global demand for sovereign bonds, with investors casting aside concerns about the country’s relapse into recession to help the government lock in funding over the next 30 years, Bloomberg News reported. Italy’s carpe diem sale is allowing it to raise 8 billion euros ($9.1 billion) as investors scramble to lend to some of the world’s biggest borrowers, including Japan, the U.S. and Greece.

A week after Christian Sewing took charge at Deutsche Bank AG in April, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s newly appointed finance minister, Olaf Scholz, buttonholed the chief executive officer of Germany’s largest lender at an event in Berlin. The 15-minute exchange -- between canapes and ceremonial speeches in a Prussian palace at the German banking association’s annual reception -- marked the start of a rapprochement between Merkel’s government and the embattled financial giant, Bloomberg News reported.

Interserve has struck a rescue deal that will see lenders take control of the company by swapping millions of pounds worth of debt for new shares, giving the troubled outsourcing group a chance of survival, Reuters reported. Racing to avert a collapse like that of peer Carillion, Interserve said on Wednesday it would cut debt by more than half to about 275 million pounds after creditors wrote off loans in return for new equity worth 97.5 percent of the share capital. Existing shareholders, who saw the company lose 90 percent of its value in 2018, will largely be wiped out.

A Scottish shopping centre sold at auction for £310,000 on Tuesday after being placed on sale with a reserve price of £1, as a tough retail climate cuts into property values, the Financial Times reported. The Postings shopping centre in Kirkcaldy was sold by the asset manager Columbia Threadneedle, which set the low reserve price because the centre — which has several vacant units — currently costs more to run than it earns in rent. The centre, built in the 1980s, most recently changed hands for £10.3m in 2003, according to Estates Gazette.

Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman has offered to buy Dia Group in a deal that gives the struggling Spanish supermarket chain an equity value of €417m, a deep discount from its €2.7bn valuation at the end of 2017, the Financial Times reported. Mr Fridman’s holding company, LetterOne, which owns 29 per cent of Dia through its L1 Retail fund, has offered to purchase the rest of the company for €0.67 a share, a premium of 56 per cent to Monday’s closing price. LetterOne bought much of its existing stake early last year, when shares were trading at about €4.