The UK is teaming up with Standard Chartered Bank to lend $100m to Zimbabwean companies in what will be the British government’s first direct commercial loan to the southern African nation’s private sector in more than 20 years, the Financial Times reported. The loan is the biggest sign of a thaw in the UK-Zimbabwe relationship since London imposed sanctions on Robert Mugabe’s regime in the early 2000s. The rapprochement follows Mr Mugabe’s forced resignation in November in a “soft coup” that ended his 37-year rule.

Not so long ago a document as radical as the draft Italian coalition program that surfaced on Tuesday night would have sent the markets into meltdown, The Wall Street Journal reported. It revealed that the 5 Star Movement and the League were still discussing this week proposals that included a demand that the European Central Bank cancel €250 billion ($297 billion) of Italian government debt.

Brokers and investment platforms have admitted they are powerless to prevent customer funds being tapped in the event of an insolvency, after a brokerage collapsed with “huge ramifications” for investors, the Financial Times reported. Some clients of Beaufort Securities, which was closed by Financial Conduct Authority in March, have been told they will have to foot the bill for costly insolvency proceedings being carried out by PwC, the professional services group.

Bosses of the collapsed construction firm Carillion should face an inquiry into their fitness to serve as directors after they masked the company’s financial ill-health with accounting tricks before its failure, Members of Parliament said on Wednesday. Carillion, which employed 43,000 people to provide services in defence, education, health and transport, collapsed in January, becoming the largest construction bankruptcy in British history, Reuters reported. It left creditors and the firm’s pensioners facing steep losses and put thousands of jobs at risk.

Italian stocks and government bonds came under heavy pressure from reports that coalition talks between the two leading populist parties could result in a government that breaks with eurozone economic orthodoxy, the Financial Times reported. According to the reports, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and far-right League had discussed proposals to ask the European Central Bank to write off about €250bn of its holdings of Italian debt, and to call for the creation of a mechanism to exit the euro.

Patrick Neary, the former chief executive of the now-defunct Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority (Ifsra), told an inquiry into Irish Nationwide Building Society that the authority’s board was not willing to tackle a series of problems at the company for fear of upsetting its planned sale, the Irish Times reported.

Europe’s largest economy cooled sharply in the first quarter amid a drop in government spending and weak exports—a sign that a stronger euro and global tensions are beginning to leave a mark on the German economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Germany’s annualized growth rate slowed to 1.2% from 2.5% in the fourth quarter of last year, the Federal Statistical Office said Tuesday. This means that the German economy was growing more slowly than the U.S., which registered growth of 2.3% in the same period.

Thomson Reuters is planning to transfer its widely used foreign exchange derivatives trading from London to Dublin to be ready for the UK’s departure from the EU next year, the Irish Times reported. In a media advisory note sent on Tuesday morning Thomson said it had commenced the process of applying to the Central Bank of Ireland for authorisation to operate the business here. The move of the company’s multilateral trading facility comes directly as a result of the UK’s planned departure from the European Union, Thomson Reuters said.

Among the reams of documents filed in the US for the proposed €79 million Smyths Toys takeover of the central European division of Toys R Us, there is some redacted material about the financing of the bid and how payments will be structured, the Irish Times reported. What could be so secret about some portions of the transaction? Smyths is proposing to buy 93 mostly German (with some Swiss and Austrian) Toys R Us stores, instantly launching the Irish company to the top of the table of speciality toy retailers in Europe.

European economic growth is strong, mainly thanks to domestic demand, but governments are not taking sufficient advantage of the good times to reduce their debt and implement reforms, the International Monetary Fund said in a forecast on Tuesday. The IMF forecast that growth in advanced European economies, mainly the euro zone, would slow to 2.3 percent this year from 2.4 percent in 2017 and then decelerate to 2.0 percent in 2019, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The European Commission forecasts the same growth slow-down.