Eurozone finance ministers were set to hail Greece’s recent steps to improve its public finances on Monday — but also to hold off on giving Athens a full bill of health it seeks as it prepares to return to financial markets, the Financial Times reported. In Mário Centeno’s first meeting as president of the eurogroup, the finance ministers will confirm that Athens has adopted the vast majority of 113 economic reforms the country needs to take under this phase of its €86bn bailout.

Private equity groups and distressed buyout firms are circling collapsed British construction company Carillion to cherry-pick assets from one of the UK’s most politically sensitive corporate failures, the Financial Times reported. The interest from private investors — including the Canadian fund manager Brookfield and British private equity group Endless, which specialises in turnrounds — comes as the government struggles to protect thousands of jobs left at risk by Carillion’s liquidation.

The design for a new class of safe financial assets intended to strengthen the euro area will be published imminently after almost a year of delay, according to officials familiar with the matter. The report, commissioned by European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, will offer a plan for bundling government debt from the bloc’s 19 nations into a security that could withstand default by one or more countries without sparking contagion, Bloomberg News reported. The European Safe Bond initiative started in September 2016 as a way to avoid a repeat of the region’s sovereign debt crisis.

Air France-KLM has held talks with Alitalia about entering the race to acquire the ailing Italian flag carrier, a decade after its efforts to purchase its peer were scuppered by political opposition, the Financial Times reported. According to people familiar with the matter, Alitalia’s government-appointed commissioners met AF-KLM executives in Paris last week to discuss the Franco-Dutch airline’s interest in joining the auction, possibly through a joint bid with easyJet, the British low-cost carrier. AF-KLM’s arrival on the scene marks a new twist in the long-running saga s

Five UK banks are facing heavy losses on loans to Carillion, after irreconcilable differences between the company, its lenders and the government pushed the UK construction and services group into liquidation on Monday, sources said. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), HSBC, Santander, Lloyds and Barclays are among the most heavily exposed after providing £140m of emergency loans in September 2017 and are also lenders on a £790m revolving credit facility, Reuters reported.

There are fewer bad loans on the balance sheets of European banks but they remain high, the European Commission said on Thursday as it prepares to push through measures to force higher provisioning for soured debt despite the opposition of big lenders, Reuters reported. The 2008-2009 global financial crisis left European banks saddled with piles of non-performing loans (NPLs) which they struggled to recoup from distressed firms and households. But as the bloc’s economy recovers, the amount of bad debt is slowly receding, the European Commission said in a report.

The level of “non-performing loans” in Ireland continues to decline significantly, falling by close to 20 per cent in the year to June 2017, the Irish Times reported. The decline is due largely to the widespread use of loan restructuring solutions, the European Commission reports. The non-performing loan (NPL) ratio – the percentage of total gross loans and advances – came down from 14.6 per cent in June 2016 to 11.6 per cent in June 2017. The figures are part of a Europe-wide study of NPLs which finds that the legacy of the financial crisis is still not behind us.

A senior EU official says Greece is close to passing its next bailout review, putting the country within reach of ending its eight-year rescue program that saved it from bankruptcy but required hugely painful austerity cuts, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. The official said that eurozone finance ministers meeting next week had "a great willingness to say that, basically, nearly everything had been done" to complete Greece's latest bailout review. That would further pave the way for the program to end in August.

Royal Bank of Scotland staff helping small firms to restructure debt during the financial crisis were given a list of ways to squeeze more money from struggling clients and told to "Just Hit Budget!", a memo released on Wednesday showed. The release of the 2008 document by the British Parliament's Treasury Select Committee (TSC) comes ahead of a debate by lawmakers on Thursday on the treatment of small business customers by the bank's Global Restructuring Group (GRG), the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

In the battle for insolvent Austrian airline Niki, its founder Niki Lauda sought to woo employees in an open letter on Wednesday by promising jobs to all current staff, Reuters reported. An agreed sale of Niki to British Airways owner IAG, brokered by Niki’s German administrator, was thrown into doubt last week by two court rulings saying Austria was the relevant jurisdiction for the insolvency proceedings.