Italian government bond yields have fallen to their lowest level since the end of September, in the wake of media reports that Rome was seeking a compromise with Brussels over its controversial deficit-boosting budget, the Financial Times reported. The yield on 10-year Italian government debt fell 10 basis points from Friday’s close to 3.11 per cent, taking its spread over the equivalent German Bund to 280 bps, its narrowest since early October. Italian finance minister Giovanni Tria met European Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis in Brussels on Monday.

The completion of Greece’s financial rescue programme this summer marked the end of the eurozone crisis. At least those were the hopes of European policymakers. Reality, however, is less forgiving, the Financial Times reported. The confrontation between Italy and the European Commission over fiscal rules has shown that the eurozone remains vulnerable to bond market breakdowns.

The digital estate agency Emoov has entered administration, six months after a merger with two rivals that it had said made it the UK’s second-largest online agency, the Financial Times reported. Russell Quirk, chief executive, told the Financial Times the eight-year-old company had “voluntarily applied for administration, albeit [with] lots of potential buyers hovering”.

Euro-area finance ministers gather in Brussels on Monday for their final meeting on buttressing the currency bloc before passing the baton to their leaders, who are expected to strike a deal later this month, Bloomberg News reported. “I don’t think the European countries are living through a period of particularly excellent economic welfare otherwise we wouldn’t have had Brexit,” Italian Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini said during a Politico conference in Brussels. “The basics of the budget won’t change: the pension overhaul, the reforms of the work conditions,” Salvini said.

A struggling Conservative council in the Midlands has been handed an effective bailout after it was allowed to use proceeds from selling its headquarters for day-to-day spending, averting a financial crisis, the Financial Times reported. Ministers have given the green light to Northamptonshire county council to break the usual prohibition on councils using capital receipts for day-to-day purposes. The authority plans to use £70m of capital receipts, £60m of which comes from selling its new headquarters, to pay off a £35m deficit from last year and top up its reserves.

EU finance ministers will on Monday discuss proposals to give the eurozone more powerful tools to prevent financial crises, the Financial Times reported. While politicians including France’s President Emmanuel Macron have floated grand ideas such as the appointment of a euro area finance minister, or the creation of a fully fledged European Monetary Fund, months of technical negotiations leading up to Monday’s so-called eurogroup meeting have focused on more low-key, politically feasible improvements to the currency union’s plumbing.

The chairwoman and chief executive have resigned, the head of finance has been fired, while the company’s dividend has been slashed and its debt downgraded to junk, the Financial Times reported. It has been a grim few months for Dia Group, the Spanish supermarket chain. The bad news has crushed the group’s shares, which have this year plummeted more than 80 per cent to under €0.70, and pushed down the company’s long-term debt to around half its face value.

Europe’s only commercial maker of military drones, Italy-based Piaggio Aerospace, has lost its sole customer after going into bankruptcy in a setback for Italian ambitions to challenge U.S. and Israeli firms in a fast growing industry, Reuters reported. Piaggio, a unit of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund Mubadala, competes with firms such as U.S. General Atomic, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin as well as Israel’s Elbit Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI).

Greece has quietly postponed a landmark bond sale after the prolonged sell-off in Italy’s bond market pushed up its cost of raising new debt, the Financial Times reported. The nation’s leftwing Syriza government had hoped to issue a benchmark 10-year bond within a few weeks of the country’s exit from its €86bn third bailout in August, as a signal to investors that Greece had returned to normalcy.

Investors in the five largest UK property funds have more than £4bn of exposure to the country’s struggling stores and shopping centres, which analysts say could shed as much as 20 per cent of their value by the end of 2019, the Financial Times reported. Retail property, including shopping centres, retail parks and high streets, makes up a significant proportion of some of the largest direct property funds that are open to individual, or retail, investors. Managers say many of these assets are now sliding in value amid a deepening crisis in the sector.