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.

McColl’s Retail Group Plc expects full-year core earnings to be flat and posted a drop in first-half like-for-like sales, as supplies were hit after last year’s collapse of cigarette wholesaler Palmer & Harvey, sending its shares down 15 percent on Monday, Reuters reported. The British convenience retailer also said Chief Financial Officer Simon Fuller was leaving the company. The company now expects 2018 full-year adjusted core earnings to be at a similar level to the prior year after a 2.7 percent drop in first-half like-for-like sales.

The number of UK companies suffering "significant" financial distress has increased nearly 10pc compared with last year and London-based firms are feeling the biggest strain, new research shows. More than 470,000 businesses felt the pinch at the end of June, according to insolvency specialist Begbies Traynor, an increase of 9pc on last year, The Telegraph reported. Those based in London are struggling the most. The capital was the country's worst performing region, with the rate of firms facing serious financial difficulty rocketing 17pc compared with June last year.

A group of landlords have filed a legal challenge to House of Fraser’s company voluntary arrangement (CVA) after creditors approved the plan to close more than half of its stores, the Financial Times reported. The group, which is advised by the property agents JLL and restructuring group Begbies Traynor, said it “believes that certain landlords have been unfairly prejudiced during this process and that there have been alleged material irregularities in the implementation of House of Fraser’s CVA”.

Royal Bank of Scotland said a scheme to compensate small firms hurt by its restructuring unit will close to new complaints after it paid out just 10 million pounds so far for direct losses, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. RBS announced the scheme in November 2016 and set aside 400 million pounds to compensate thousands of small businesses that say they were mistreated by RBS's Global Restructuring Group (GRG).

Former traders for Barclays and Deutsche Bank were sentenced to a combined 13 years in prison by a London judge for conspiring to rig interest-rate benchmarks, the Irish Times reported. Christian Bittar (46), a Deutsche Bank employee, was sentenced to five years and four months, while the man described by prosecutors as his fellow mastermind in manipulating the market, Barclays’ Philippe Moryoussef, received eight years. The 50-year-old Moryoussef was sentenced in absentia after staying in France to avoid the trial.

Preparations for a no-deal Brexit are ramping up in Europe, as the public and private sectors brace for a hard break-up that would hit long-term EU economic output by up to 1.5 per cent, the Financial Times reported. Yet Brussels’ drive to prepare for the worst also highlights one of the big impediments to planning: authorities are not revealing the steps they will take to mitigate the “serious disruption” expected in the aftermath of a hard Brexit.

It is not easy to make a financial crisis sound boring. This week Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner almost did that, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. With the 10-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse approaching, the three luminaries — who were respectively US Federal Reserve chairman, Treasury secretary and New York Federal Reserve president in 2008 — have been talking to the media about the crisis. And their verdict is sanguine — if not a little smug.

If it walks and quacks like an emerging markets balance of payments crisis, is it really an emerging markets balance of payments crisis? We are not yet there, and hopefully it will not come to one. But the patterns recently displayed by global financial markets are sufficiently redolent of capital flight from poorer countries in the past that caution is in order, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. Start with foreign exchange. In the second quarter emerging markets currencies had their worst fall in seven years.

The European Union’s bank-failure rules are forcing Austria’s Volksbanken to open up the lending tap, a strategy reminiscent of the one that nearly brought down the cooperative group a few years ago, Bloomberg News reported. The irony has arisen because the EU requires banks to have sufficient loss-absorbing liabilities on their books to cover the costs of their restructuring and refinancing in a crisis, avoiding the sort of massive public bailout that kept Volksbanken alive in 2012.