U.K. retailer Debenhams Plc, which has issued three profit warnings this year, recruited restructuring experts from KPMG LLP as an insurance provider again raised the cost to cover suppliers’ shipments to the company, British newspapers reported. The KPMG team has been instructed to draw up an emergency turnaround plan, including the possible filing of a company voluntary arrangement, a form of bankruptcy protection, the Sunday Telegraph reported, without saying where it got the information, Bloomberg News reported.

The UK insolvency service is investigating scandal-hit public relations firm Bell Pottinger, including its influential co-founder Lord Tim Bell, for work in South Africa that led to the company’s collapse last year, the Financial Times reported. According to letters seen by the Financial Times, two senior partners have been told the UK government agency is examining potential “breaches of duties or other misconduct” relating to their controversial work for the Gupta family’s Oakbay investment vehicle.

Brussels said it has received assurances from the Italian government that it will work to bring down the country’s high level of public debt, in the latest step by Rome to ease EU concerns about its spending plans, the Financial Times reported.

Germany’s trade surplus narrowed in July to its smallest level in more than four years, as exports slipped while imports jumped during a period of escalating trade tensions that has seen the EU targeted by US tariffs. The data from the Federal Statistics Office (Destatis), which showed the foreign trade balance dropped by €3.2bn to a €15.8bn surplus in calendar and seasonally-adjusted terms, is the latest indication of weakness in the export-driven economy of the eurozone’s powerhouse, the Financial Times reported. Germany has not run a smaller surplus since March 2014.

In 2013, Slovenia rescued its failing banks by wiping out stock investors and holders of about 600 million euros ($700 million) of debt. Now some of those investors want their money back, Bloomberg News reported. While their appeals have had limited success so far, a shake-up at the central bank and a ruling from the nation’s Constitutional Court suggest the matter is far from closed. The investors are pushing for a law that would enable them to recoup losses, while putting the tiny Balkan state on a collision course with the European Union and European Central Bank.

Turnround specialist Melrose Industries, which swooped on GKN in an £8bn hostile takeover this year, swung to a loss in the first half but said it had found no financial “black holes” in its new acquisition, the Financial Times reported. The FTSE 100 group reported a statutory operating loss of £256m for the period to the end of June. This included £124m in costs for the GKN acquisition — on advisers and in taxes — as well as £128m in restructuring costs, plus inventory writedowns and hedging losses.

The UK’s financial-markets watchdog put accountants on notice that they must improve auditing of financial companies’ client assets, the Financial Times reported. Charles Randell, the chairman of the Financial Conduct Authority, said on Thursday that the regulator had spotted instances where an audit of client assets was “just not good enough”, adding to the disquiet among regulators about the quality of financial firms’ audits. “We continue to see Client Assets reports that are just not good enough,” Mr Randell said in a speech, according to prepared remarks.

Greek banks made further progress during this year's second quarter in reducing their exposure to doubtful and non-performing loans, central bank data showed on Thursday. So-called non-performing exposures (NPEs) are the biggest challenge facing the sector, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. At the end of June they had fallen by 4.1 percent from the first quarter to 88.6 billion euros (79.7 billion pounds) or 47.6 percent of banks' overall loan book compared with a target of 90.2 billion euros or 46.9 percent.

Just in case you needed another sign that Germany’s factory sector hit a rough patch this summer: manufacturing orders in the eurozone’s largest economy posted a surprise dip in July, according to new data released on Thursday, the Financial Times reported. New orders in manufacturing fell 0.9 per cent in July from June, according to the Federal Statistics Office. The reading was substantially worse than the 1.8 per cent rise that was forecast by economists in a Reuters poll. The figure was also down 0.9 per cent on a year-on-year basis.

Ten years on from the financial tumult that led to the government of the day having to guarantee the viability of the State’s banks in an historic and unprecedented move, we look at the events of September 2008. Each day this month, we will recall some of the stories that pointed to the dramatic unravelling of the global banking system, The Irish Times reported.