The owner of Britain’s Patisserie Valerie café chain warned on Thursday that it is in danger of collapse if it cannot urgently raise capital after discovering a potential accounting fraud, Reuters reported. Patisserie Holdings said an investigation had found a “material shortfall” between the reported accounts of the London-listed company and its true financial health. “Without an immediate injection of capital, the directors are of the view that there is no scope for the business to continue trading in its current form,” it said in a statement.

European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen urged Italy on Thursday to submit a draft budget in line with commitments and warned of risks for Italy and other euro zone states, Reuters reported. Italy’s eurosceptic government raised market concern when it announced two weeks ago a plan to raise its headline budget gap to 2.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2019 and flout fiscal targets agreed with euro zone peers. “The situation is very fragile,” Katainen told reporters when asked about Italy’s budgetary plans and initially negative market reaction.

It was good while it lasted for Europe’s construction companies. The state kept them in work with a steady supply of contracts, local banks provided the financing and profits rose. Then came the financial crisis and the longest recession of the postwar era leaving states unable to spend and banks unwilling to lend, Bloomberg News reported. Much of the once-thriving industry has been pushed to the brink.

Greece’s central bank governor has blamed Italy’s market turmoil for a drop in the share prices of Greek banks, saying that the falls “are not related to the soundness of Greek banks”. Italian government bonds have seen a fresh sell-off in recent days, as investors mull the growing likelihood that Rome will face-off against Brussels over a budget-busting spending plan, the Financial Times reported. In the past two weeks the yield on 10-year Italian debt has risen by 80 basis points, to hit 3.712 per cent — its highest level since early 2014.

The Bank of England and the financial services industry on Tuesday pressed the EU to urgently tackle legal uncertainty surrounding vast amounts of derivatives because of Brexit, the Financial Times reported. Calling for “timely action” by EU authorities, the BoE’s Financial Policy Committee said if the UK crashed out of the bloc without a withdrawal agreement it risked rendering void £41tn of derivatives.

A recurrent debate since the eurocrisis has been whether stability tools should share risk among Member States or, instead, segregate risks within individual countries. As the eurozone discusses — and postpones — genuine risk-sharing measures, such as European deposit insurance, it’s important to look back at when risks were shared, and who actually benefited. The common narrative is that rescue programs have helped deeply troubled countries avoid sovereign bankruptcy or widespread bank failures, the Financial Times reported in a commentary.

Brussels has been “overly generous” to Italy’s government, allowing it to flout the EU’s budget rules last year, the head of an independent watchdog has said, fuelling criticism of the European Commission’s policing of the bloc’s public finances, the Financial Times reported. Niels Thygesen, the chair of the European Fiscal Board, told the Financial Times the European Commission had gone “beyond” the necessary flexibility allowed to Italy during the country’s budget negotiations with Brussels in 2017.

German carmaker Opel, owned by France’s PSA Group, said on Tuesday it would stop selling the Cascada convertible, the Adam city car and the KARL at the end of 2019, as part of a product overhaul to focus on sport-utility vehicles. The maker Opel and British Vauxhall branded cars blamed new emissions rules for the cull, but the carmaker has struggled to reach sustainable profitability after racking up more than a decade of losses selling low-margin cars under previous owner General Motors, Reuters reported.

A sharp fall in imports pushed Germany’s trade surplus sharply higher in August, according to new data released on Tuesday that underscore the summer slowdown in parts of the global manufacturing sector, the Financial Times reported. The trade balance reached €18.3bn in August on seasonal and calendar adjusted terms, according to the Federal Statistics Office. The jolt higher represented a bounceback from a steep fall during the previous month. Imports dropped 2.7 per cent in August from July to €92bn, while exports slipped 0.1 per cent to €110.3bn.