Creditors of India’s bankrupt Essar Steel have accepted an offer from ArcelorMittal, the global steel giant said on Friday, in a major step towards its efforts to establish a meaningful presence in India, the Financial Times reported. The announcement came a day after Essar’s founding Ruia family offered to pay off the company’s entire outstanding debt of Rs543bn ($7.4bn), in a last-ditch attempt to pull the company out of the insolvency proceedings and halt the sale by creditors.

A Portuguese court approved on Friday a debt restructuring plan that was passed by creditors in major Brazilian telecom firm Oi SA, marking a step forward in the company’s tortured bankruptcy recovery process, Reuters reported. With the court’s approval, seen by Reuters, bankruptcy courts in all relevant jurisdictions - Brazil, the United States, the Netherlands, and now Portugal - have signed off on the recovery plan, which was approved by creditors in December.

Italy's banks are charging households and businesses more to borrow after a fall in the value of the country's bonds, the first sign of a credit tightening that could disrupt the populist government's economic revival plans, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Investors have been dumping Italian assets since the formation in June of a coalition government whose draft 2019 budget plan this month prompted Moody's to cut Italy's credit rating and the European Commission to demand a revision.

German business confidence fell in October according to a closely-watched gauge of sentiment, as growing geopolitical tensions drove cross-sector pessimism about the year ahead, the Financial Times reported. Manufacturing businesses in particular were “markedly” less optimistic about the future. Their assessment of the current business climate fell to its lowest level since March 2017, and they reported incoming orders had extended their decline.

The European Central Bank is facing serious challenges: rising tensions between Brussels and Rome, doubts about monetary policy and worries about Britain crashing out of the EU without a deal, the Financial Times reported. A closely watched poll of purchasing managers published on Wednesday also showed that the region’s businesses are struggling to come to terms with increased global trade tensions — and that the export-led slowdown is beginning to affect the much larger services sector. Such problems have not changed the ECB’s mind since its last big meeting six weeks ago.

For nearly a decade, Trafigura Group Chairman Claude Dauphin coveted a zinc deal with Europe’s top smelter. The commodities trader finally got across the threshold in 2015, months after its co-founder’s sudden death. Just a few years later, it’s become one of Trafigura’s biggest headaches, Bloomberg News reported. Nyrstar NV shares have plunged to record lows as falling zinc prices squeeze profit and drive worries about its huge pile of debt.

ScS Group said on Thursday it would stop selling its sofas and carpets at House of Fraser stores from January, saying the partnership had ceased to be beneficial since billionaire Mike Ashley bought the collapsed department store group, Reuters reported. Sports Direct, the British sportswear retailer controlled by Ashley, snapped up House of Fraser and its 58 stores from administrators for 90 million pounds ($116 million) in August.

Manufacturers from the eurozone’s two largest economies painted a gloomy picture of the outlook for the sector on Wednesday, with closely-watched indicators sinking to more than two-year lows in both countries. In Germany, the decline in sentiment extended to the services sector, dragging the composite output purchasing managers’ index to a 41-month low of 52.7. The fall in the gauge was far sharper than analysts polled by Reuters had expected: a drop of just 0.2 points to 54.8 had been anticipated.

Nasdaq, the exchanges operator, reported a 4.1 per cent drop in net income for the third quarter, which included an $8m loss related to the default of Einar Aas, a private Norwegian trader whose bets in the European power market collapsed last month, the Financial Times reported. Nasdaq is the principal trading exchange where futures contracts tied to physical energy markets in the Nordic region are transacted. The loss contributed to an increase in Nasdaq’s overall operating expenses in the quarter to $354m from $341m a year ago.

Fears of a lengthy slowdown in eurozone growth intensified on Wednesday after an influential poll of sentiment fell to its lowest level in more than two years. The sharp decline in the purchasing managers’ index reflected signs that the global trade war is having broad repercussions on the economy of the world’s largest trading bloc. The index reading for the single currency area fell to 52.7 in October, down from 54.1 in September, and the lowest figure for 25 months.