Not long ago, EU leaders were talking about a grand bargain to reform their currency union. It isn’t happening. Europe’s finance ministers have just approved a package of reforms to strengthen the monetary union, a Bloomberg View reported. Their plan falls far short of what’s needed. The new proposals aren’t worthless — any steps to better equip the euro zone to deal with the next financial crisis are welcome. But they conspicuously fail to address the system’s most important weaknesses: deposit insurance and fiscal policy.

Italy’s government will extend to the end of June the deadline for Alitalia to repay a 900 million euro ($1 billion) bridge loan, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Friday. The current deadline is Dec. 15, but Di Maio said the government would change the date in a decree to be approved on Monday, Reuters reported. The loan was given to the airline, which is under special administration and is being run by state commissioners, to keep it afloat until it can restructure and find partners.

Troubled low-cost African carrier Fastjet Plc warned on Friday it may have to go into administration, shut shop or sell itself as it had only enough cash to keep it in business for another seven days, Reuters reported. The airline, which had a cash balance of $6.8 million as of Thursday, said it might have to formally hire insolvency advisers for the process if its cash balance does not improve.

Italy has bought back €3.2bn of its short-dated debt in a move that was financed by tapping an existing three-year bond, the Financial Times reported. The Italian Treasury said in a statement that the rationale for the move was “to improve the liquidity and the efficiency of the secondary market for government securities”. The €3.2bn of new three-year debt was sold via syndication on Thursday by re-opening the October 2021 bond, which carries a 2.3 per cent coupon. It is Italy’s first syndicated deal since January, and its last debt sale of this year.

Monarch Airlines’ collapse last year put at risk £30m of Manchester Airports Group’s earnings, as it hurried to find airlines to fill slots that had brought 2m passengers a year through the UK’s third-busiest airport, the Financial Times reported. MAG has since replaced — or “backfilled” — the 2m passenger capacity previously used by Monarch, chief executive Charlie Cornish said on Thursday. But filling the slots took time, Mr Cornish said, and left the group facing a tricky trading situation.

Italy’s populist government is at loggerheads over how to temper its proposed spending spree, as Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte seeks to forge a new budget plan to submit to European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker next week, Bloomberg News reported. Conte will meet Juncker in Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday in the latest attempt to avert possible fines on Italy, according to his office.

Noble Group Ltd. is preparing for an insolvency filing after Singaporean regulators blocked a key element of its $3.5 billion debt restructuring, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is considering what’s known as a "pre-pack" administration, a procedure that allows for a debt restructuring in court through a pre-agreed plan with creditors, one of the people said, asking not to be identified because the talks are private, Bloomberg News reported.

European Union lawmakers backed new rules on Thursday that would soften requirements on the money that banks must set aside to cover potential losses from new debt that turns sour, Reuters reported. The changes adopted by lawmakers in the economic affairs committee of the European Parliament will need approval from EU governments before they become law. They represent an easing of the requirements from a deal reached in October by EU governments, which in turn had softened an earlier European Commission proposal, and met with opposition in some quarters for being too lenient.

Italian builder Astaldi is talking to Fortress and other alternative lenders to secure 70 million euros ($80 million) of immediate bridge funding in a race to stay afloat, three sources said on Thursday. Italy’s biggest infrastructure builder by sales filed for court protection from creditors in September after being hit by delays to plans to sell a bridge in Turkey, Reuters reported. “The 70 million euros is the first tranche of an overall bridge package of some 200 million euros and will cover finance needs to the end of next February,” one of the sources said.

Russia’s Sberbank, a key stakeholder in Croatian food producer and retailer Agrokor, has started to receive proposals to sell its share in the firm which is emerging from a debt crisis, an aide to Sberbank’s CEO said. Agrokor, the largest firm in the Balkans with over 50,000 staff, was put under state-run administration last year, crippled by debts built up during an ambitious expansion drive, Reuters reported. In October, a Croatian court approved a deal for the indebted Agrokor that includes a debt-for-equity swap.