Last-ditch talks to save Interserve, one of the UK’s biggest government contractors, have narrowed in on a debt-for-equity swap, with hopes rising that a restructuring will be announced this week, the Financial Times reported. The group’s board met on Tuesday after weeks of fraught negotiations with lenders and the Cabinet Office over rescuing a company that employs 45,000 people across services such as schools and hospitals. “Everyone is running ragged trying to find a settlement,” said one person involved in the talks. “It’s a bit like Brexit.

Sunrise Records, a Canadian chain of record stores, agreed to buy most of HMV Group Plc in an auction overseen by the embattled music retailer’s administrators, fending off a rival bid by retail magnate Mike Ashley, Bloomberg News reported. Douglas Putnam, who runs Sunrise and bought HMV’s Canadian unit in 2017, will gain control of 100 stores across the U.K., KPMG LLP said Tuesday. The remaining 27 shops will be shut down, putting 455 employees out of work.

Prayers for a sudden return to dovish monetary policies have been answered, and now investors are living with the aftermath: a world awash with $8.6 trillion in negative-yielding debt, Bloomberg News reported. That’s one reason money managers are wading once more into the fringes of fixed-income markets across the globe. Consider the action over the past week: Serial defaulter Ecuador managed to sell $1 billion in new bonds even as the government is in talks for International Monetary Fund financing.

Holiday airline Germania collapsed on Tuesday and canceled all flights immediately, the latest to succumb to turbulence in the European airline industry as it failed to secure financing to navigate a short-term cash squeeze, Reuters reported. The insolvency of the German company, which carried about 4 million passengers a year, followed the failure of Germany’s second-biggest carrier, Air Berlin, in 2017. Britain’s Monarch Airlines and Alitalia also filed for insolvency in 2017. German charter carrier Small Planet Airlines hit financial trouble last year after an expansion drive.

Difficulties getting access to their collateral in the event of loan default means potential new entrants into the State’s mortgage market are likely to “think twice”, the interim chief executive of the Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland said. Joe Brennan reports that his comments come against a background of increasing political clamour to make it even more difficult to repossess homes, The Irish Times reported.

Italy’s Treasury is not planning to seek EU approval to extend a state guarantee scheme Rome devised to help banks offload bad loans in order to include so-called “unlikely-to-pay” (UTP) loans, a government source said, Reuters reported. Italy introduced the ‘GACS’ scheme to ease bad loan sales. Under the measure, which expires in early March after being renewed twice, banks can buy a guarantee from the state to wrap the least risky tranche in a bad loan securitisation sale.

German airline Germania said on Tuesday it had filed for insolvency and would terminate flight operations immediately, citing rising fuel prices and a stronger dollar, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. There were also delays integrating aircraft into the fleet and a high number of "maintenance events", the company said in a statement. CEO Karsten Balke said it was unable to cover a short-term liquidity need. The company advised customers to contact holiday operators to be rebooked.

Investor sentiment for the eurozone fell to the lowest level in more than four years as fears mount of a downturn in the single currency area against a backdrop of weaker global growth, the Financial Times reported. The overall index in the eurozone declined to -3.7 in February from -1.5 a month earlier, the lowest since November 2014 and its sixth decline in a row, a measure from Frankfurt-based research house Sentix showed. The Sentix index adds to other reports that signal the single currency area is slowing.

Debt-burdened telecom carrier Altice Europe is gearing up to sell a stake in its high-speed fiber network business in Portugal, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, with an auction process expected to kick off within a fortnight, Reuters reported. Altice, which took control of Portugal Telecom in 2015, is looking to replicate its recent sale of a 49.99 percent stake in French fiber optic business SFR FTTH to three investment funds for 1.8 billion euros. The group, whose founder is billionaire Patrick Drahi, has hired Lazard to sound out potential bidders including U.S.

Investors are piling into European government debt as the outlook for the global economy clouds over and the likelihood of rate rises fades, the Financial Times reported.