British retail tycoon Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct has withdrawn its offer to buy scandal-hit British cafe chain owner Patisserie Holdings, a source told Reuters on Monday. Sports Direct on Friday offered to buy Patisserie out of administration to enlarge an empire stretching from department stores and sofa shops to lingerie, but wrote to Patisserie administrators KPMG saying it lacked the information required to continue bidding, British media reported on Sunday, Reuters reported. Patisserie Valerie was plunged into crisis in October after its owner uncovered accounting irregularities.

Deutsche Bank AG is paying some of the highest rates among large banks to raise debt this year, highlighting a key obstacle in the lender’s turnaround effort, Bloomberg News reported. Germany’s biggest bank this week sold $1.25 billion of three-year dollar bonds that pay 255 basis points over benchmark interest rates, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. That’s almost twice what other European lenders have paid in recent months.

Despite recent claims that it had filled a €15 million liquidity gap, the privately-owned German airline was forced to file for insolvency late on Monday and stopped flights early yesterday. The move leaves some 1,700 employees, who reportedly have not been paid for January, facing the loss of their jobs. Germania, with a fleet of 37 planes, flew more than four million passengers a year from regional German airports to 60 destinations in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

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.