A group of building industry players, including the daughter of former developer Liam Maye, has bought the Basta locks and ironmongery brand out of examinership, The Irish Times reported. Basta, which went into examinership in July, employed 48 people. It was based in Sligo where it was founded more than 60 years ago. Desand, an Irish company, has acquired the brand, its goodwill and the company’s stock but is not acquiring the business, or its staff. It said it would continue to trade as Basta “as this continues to be one of the strongest brands in the sector for over 60 years”.

VTB, Russia's second biggest bank, plans to focus on organic growth over the next three years after snapping up smaller peers to expand across the country, the bank's First Deputy Chief Executive Dmitry Olyunin said. In the past, VTB has relied on both acquisitions and organic expansion, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Its biggest deal to date was the ill-fated takeover of Bank of Moscow in 2011, then Russia's fifth biggest bank, where a big portion of bad assets was discovered during the takeover.

One of the UK’s biggest pension funds is to lend to small businesses through online platform ThinCats, in a move that could transform the way they are financed. BAE Systems Pensions on Monday announced a £200m programme with ThinCats, a peer-to-peer lender that targets fast-growing small and medium-sized businesses. UK SMEs remain far more reliant on bank lending than those in many other developed countries and the government has been encouraging pension funds to provide finance to them, the Financial Times reported.

Shares in Interserve lost more than half their value on Monday after the British support services provider said it was in rescue talks which may hand control of the company to creditors in a bid to avoid a Carillion-style collapse, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The Reading-based outsourcer, which employs 75,000 worldwide and has thousands of UK government contracts to clean hospitals and serve school meals, said on Sunday it would seek to cut its debt to 1.5 times core earnings in talks with lenders it hopes to complete early next year.

The French central bank has slashed its growth forecasts for the fourth quarter largely due to the impact of the often violent anti-government protests which shut down central Paris more than once in the last month. The Banque de France cut its expectation for growth in the last quarter of the year from 0.4 per cent to 0.2 per cent on Monday following another weekend of protest by the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, the Financial Times reported. Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister, has said the protests were a “catastrophe” for the economy.

Investor sentiment for the eurozone dropped to the lowest level in four years in December as concerns of an impending global economic downturn grow, the Financial Times reported. A measure from Frankfurt-based research house Sentix dropped into negative territory for the first time in four years in December, falling to minus 0.3 from 8.8 in the previous month and down from 32.9 at the start of the year. Economists polled by Reuters had expected it to drop to 8.1.

Vijay Mallya, the fugitive Indian tycoon fighting multiple cases in the U.K. after defaulting on loans, lost a bid to avoid extradition to his home country where he faces charges of fraud and money laundering, Bloomberg News reported. Judge Emma Arbuthnot ruled against Mallya at a hearing in London Monday, largely rejecting Mallya’s arguments that the case was politically motivated. "I do not accept the courts in India are there to do what the politicians tell them what to do," Arbuthnot told a packed courtroom.

Improvement in German manufacturing orders has yet to feed through to production, with the latest industrial production data indicating an unexpected month-on-month decline, the Financial Times reported. Industrial orders have increased on a month-on-month basis in each month since August, according to data published by the national statistics agency on Thursday. Output, however, declined in October from September, after edging 0.1 per cent higher in each of the previous two months.

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.