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.

A global resurgence in protectionism, political turbulence within the single currency area and turmoil in some emerging markets have made the eurozone’s financial system more vulnerable to shocks, the European Central Bank has acknowledged, the Financial Times reported. The ECB said in the latest edition of its twice-yearly Financial Stability Review the risks to the region’s financial system had risen since May, and identified four threats to the eurozone that is yet to fully recover from the financial crisis ten years on.

Emoov is considering a pre-pack administration after a four-week search for a buyer has so far failed to seal a rescue deal for the cash-strapped digital estate agency, the Financial Times reported. Russell Quirk, chief executive, this week told the FT: “A pre-pack is not being ruled out” and that “time is of the essence . . . we are eagerly searching for someone to support the business”. Sky News reported on Thursday that Emoov was on the verge of appointing James Cowper Kreston, an accountancy firm, as administrator.

Icelandair Group Hf abandoned its plan to buy low-cost rival Wow Air Hf, sending the krona tumbling amid concern that the country’s tourism industry could be hit if the discounter collapses, Bloomberg News reported.