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.

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.