German airlines group Lufthansa has held talks to take a majority stake in ailing Italian carrier Alitalia and would be interested in a full takeover in the long run, Lufthansa board member Harry Hohmeister said on Monday, Reuters reported. Alitalia, which was put under special administration in 2017, would remain operationally independent within the Lufthansa group, with its own brand, he said. Lufthansa has been a key player in hectic M&A activity in the industry, snapping up Brussels Airlines and parts of insolvent Air Berlin in 2017 to expand in the budget market.

Intesa Sanpaolo SpA is preparing a sale of non-performing loans from a 15.6 billion-euro ($17.8 billion) pool of debt on its books categorized as “unlikely-to-pay,” according to four people familiar with the discussions, Bloomberg News reported. The loans are backed by real-estate and corporate assets, said the people, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The Italian lender has yet to decide how much of the debt it will sell and is still consulting investors to gauge demand, the people said.

Europe’s retail crisis deepened as companies in the U.K. and Germany are set to cut thousands of jobs as online shopping accelerates the erosion of sales from traditional bricks-and-mortar stores, Bloomberg News reported. Tesco, the biggest U.K. grocer, will eliminate about 15,000 positions and close meat, fish and delicatessen counters, the Mail on Sunday reported, citing unidentified industry sources.

Italy’s Carige said on Friday it had issued 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion) in state-guaranteed debt after the Rome government approved the emergency liquidity measure earlier this month to prop up the ailing bank, Reuters. Italy rushed to set up a 1.3 billion euro fund to support Carige after the European Central Bank put the bank under temporary administration on Jan. 2 following a failed attempt to raise new capital from investors. Carige said it had issued two bonds worth 1 billion euros each.

Metro Bank has disclosed that it failed to have enough capital backing some commercial loans because of an accounting error, sending shares in the upstart challenger to Britain’s big high-street lenders to their worst one-day loss, The Irish Times reported. The bank, which has expanded rapidly to 66 UK branches since launching in 2010, also issued a profit warning, saying its full-year profits and capital levels would be weaker than expected after a “soft” end to the year. Metro Bank’s shares were down nearly 40 per cent in late trading.

It’s said that British politicians care only about one subject right now, but besides Brexit there’s at least one other mess that needs sorting out quickly: The poor quality of company audits. While this may sound like a dry topic, it has ugly real-world implications, a Bloomberg View reported. Just look at the collapse this week of cake chain Patisserie Valerie’s owner after an accounting scandal, an event that puts as many as 2,800 jobs at risk.

France’s private sector slipped further into contraction in January despite a tentative recovery in its manufacturing sector, a closely watched survey showed on Thursday, the Financial Times reported. Disruption to business caused by a series of protests and blockages which swept the country at the end of the year resulted in the first contraction in the private sector for two-and-a-half years in December 2018. The latest purchasing managers’ survey from IHS Markit showed that turbulence had rippled into 2019.

British Airways parent IAG SA abandoned an eight-month pursuit of Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA, leaving the indebted discount airline reeling as it faces a cash crunch during the slow winter season, Bloomberg News reported. IAG “does not intend” to make a further bid and will be selling a 3.9 percent stake in due course, it said Thursday. Norwegian slumped as much as 26 percent, the most ever, while IAG reversed earlier declines to trade higher. Bjorn Kjos, the Scandinavian carrier’s chief executive officer, previously rejected two offers from London-based IAG as undervaluing the business.

Germany’s powerhouse manufacturing sector slipped into contraction in January, an early indicator showed, underscoring the extent of the slowdown in the eurozone’s largest economy, the Financial Times reported. The IHS Markit manufacturing purchasing managers' index dropped to 49.9 in January from 51.8 in December, marking its lowest level in more than four years. The gauge fell below the threshold of 50 that separates expansion from contraction and fell far short of a score of 51.3 expected by economists in a Reuters poll.

The European Central Bank has sounded the alarm over the eurozone economy, warning a slowdown it thought would be temporary was showing signs of becoming long-lasting because of global trade tensions, Brexit and financial market volatility, the Financial Times reported. The shift in outlook, which policymakers said had clearly “moved to the downside”, comes just six weeks after the ECB removed the most important element of its crisis-era stimulus, halting new purchases of bonds as part of its €2.6tn quantitative easing programme.