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.

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.

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.

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.

Since Italy’s coalition government took power, its first budget plans have loomed as the likely trigger for a showdown between Rome and Brussels. The anti-establishment Five Star party and anti-migrant League campaigned on a platform of expensive policies such as a flat tax reform and a universal basic income, ambitions that seemed likely to collide with a European Commission deeply nervous about Italy’s vast debt pile, the Financial Times reported.

Optimism in Spain’s services sector fell to a five-year low in August, amid rising input costs and a slowdown in new business growth, according to data released on Wednesday by IHS Markit, the Financial Times reported. Spain’s purchasing managers’ index fell to 52.1, below an analyst forecast of 52.7 according to a Reuters poll, as new orders rose at their slower pace since 2016. Although executives felt that the sector had continued to grow overall — a reading over 50 denotes growth — this was at a “much weaker” rate than earlier in the year, said economists at IHS Markit.

Erik Heim, the CEO of Nordic Aquafarms, says his company will not be hindered in its construction of new recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) Atlantic salmon facilities in both Belfast, Maine, and Fredrikstad, Norway, by the news that vendor Inter Aqua Advance (IAA) has filed for bankruptcy protection, Undercurrent News reported. "We are working with a portfolio of vendors, including several RAS vendors, in addition to our internal engineering department that is growing," Heim said in an email to Undercurrent News.

UK restaurant chain Gaucho is to be bought out of administration by two banks Investec and SC Lowry, as part of a rescue deal that will keep open all 16 Gaucho restaurants and save about 750 jobs, the Financial Times reported. The deal is subject to Gaucho’s creditors accepting a “ company voluntary arrangement”, an agreement that allows ailing businesses to restructure their debt.

The Austrian presidency of the European Union has asked the bloc’s finance ministers and central bankers to discuss a hike in interest rates in meetings to be held later this week in Vienna, Reuters reported. In a move that could be seen as a partial encroachment on the powers of the European Central Bank, the Austrian government, which holds for the EU’s rotating presidency, wants to hold a discussion on “financial stability implications of increasing interest rates,” a document seen by Reuters said.