Rebel shareholders narrowly won a vote to oust the entire board of Ellaktor, Greece’s largest construction company, at Wednesday’s annual meeting in Athens, the Financial Times reported. According to the final count of proxy votes, 52.92 per cent of votes cast were in favour of a new nine-member board to be headed by Georgios Provopoulos, a former central bank governor, as chairman, while 47.08 per cent backed the current board led by Dimitris Koutras, a co-founder of Ellaktor and Leonidas Bobolas, head of the company’s construction concessions arm.

Deutsche Bank AG vowed to maintain its position in fixed-income trading after recording its weakest second quarter in that business since the global financial crisis, as Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing accelerates the lender’s turnaround effort, Bloomberg News reported. Income from buying and selling fixed-income securities slumped 17 percent from a year earlier to 1.37 billion euros ($1.6 billion), the lowest figure for the period since 2008, Germany’s largest bank said on Wednesday. The five largest U.S.

German business expectations declined for the eighth month in a row in July even as the current assessment brightened, amid persistent concerns over the Washington-led trade battle, according to new data released on Wednesday. The Ifo Institute’s gauge of business expectations in the eurozone’s largest economy slipped to 98.2 in July from 98.5 in the previous month, the Financial Times reported. It ended last year at 102.7. Germany has a large, open economy with a big factory sector, meaning headwinds to global trade have an outsize effect on the country.

Amid rising rates, ballooning debt levels and widening spreads there’s one statistic that gives comfort to credit investors: default rates. Insulated by cheap money from the QE era and bolstered by cash on their balance sheets, it remains rare for companies in Europe and the U.S. to miss debt payments, Bloomberg News reported. Among higher-risk speculative-grade firms the default rate fell to 2.9 percent last quarter, and may drop further to 2.1 percent by year-end, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

Hammerson plans to sell £1.1bn of properties by the end of 2019 and buy back up to £300m of shares as the shopping centre landlord tries to appease unhappy shareholders and the activist investors Elliott, the Financial Times reported. Setting out a new strategy after a turbulent period of failed takeovers earlier this year, the FTSE 250 group said it would increase non-UK exposure above half of its portfolio for the first time in its recent history.

Foreign investors shed record volumes of Italian debt in May as a sharp sell-off hit the country’s bond market, according to data highlighting the challenges facing the new populist government in the coming months. Italy’s governing coalition is set to bring forward a contentious budget this autumn, which some investors fear could threaten the country’s fiscal outlook, the Financial Times reported. Earlier this month the new government said it would not take any further measures to cut its deficit this year and warned of a possible downgrade to growth forecasts.

The eurozone’s economy is still at risk of a slowdown, with an influential poll of purchasing managers giving an early indication that growth will remain weak in the second half of this year after a bumper 2017. Flash readings of the purchasing managers’ index for July released on Tuesday suggest manufacturers across the single currency area are struggling to adjust to mounting concerns about the threat of a global trade war, the Financial Times reported.

Ulster Bank is seeking regulatory approval to close a compensation scheme for small companies whose businesses were negatively affected by being put into a controversial restructuring unit during the financial crisis, The Irish Times reported. Sources said the bank is in contact with the Central Bank of Ireland about agreeing a deadline by which customers will have to make a complaint on their treatment by the lender’s now-defunct global restructuring group (GRG).

Ramón Rivera had barely gotten his olive oil business started in the sun-swept Alentejo region of Portugal when Europe’s debt crisis struck. The economy crumbled, wages were cut, and unemployment doubled, the International New York Times reported. The government in Lisbon had to accept a humiliating international bailout. But as the misery deepened, Portugal took a daring stand: In 2015, it cast aside the harshest austerity measures its European creditors had imposed, igniting a virtuous cycle that put its economy back on a path to growth.

Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini has vowed to reform the European Union by giving member states more control over their economic policies, The Daily Express reported. In a stinging attack on Brussels, Mr Salvini claimed the Eurozone was responsible for soaring levels of public debt in Italy. And he said it was time for EU member states to be take back their "freedom" from unelected bureaucrats. Mr Salvini, the head of Italy's right-wing Lega party, said: "The word 'populism' is a compliment to me.