The Irish economy is about a third smaller than expected. The country’s current account surplus is actually a deficit, the Financial Times reported. And its debt level is at least a quarter higher than taxpayers have been led to believe. These are some of the startling results thrown up by a new measure of Irish economic activity adopted by Ireland’s official statisticians. The measure, known as “modified gross national income” and presented as GNI*, is an attempt to de-globalise one of the world’s most open economies.

Europe’s booming junk bond market is provoking alarm among analysts who say investors are letting down their guard and risking future losses. Dutch department store operator Hema BV, home improvement retailer Maxeda DIY Holding BV and supercar maker McLaren Group are the latest in a string of companies that have sold bonds with weaker investor protections, known as covenants, and with more loopholes written into the documents that govern the debt, Bloomberg News reported.

Carillion has hired professional services firm EY to assist with a review of its finances, as the UK construction and support services group turns to more outside advisers in a bid to repair its balance sheet, the Financial Times reported. The FTSE 250 group said it had brought in EY “with immediate effect” to work on the strategic review it announced last week, with a focus on cutting costs and collecting more cash from contracts.

Russian conglomerate Sistema has announced it has suffered a technical default on Rbs 3.9bn worth of debt, after a court froze more than $3bn worth of its assets as part of a legal battle with state-controlled oil giant Rosneft. Sistema on Monday announced the technical default, saying that it was “driven exclusively” by the asset freeze, the Financial Times reported.

In 2014, U.K. builder Carillion Plc was riding high: it had just won a $434 million contract to build the Royal Liverpool Hospital and was attempting to snap up its struggling rival Balfour Beatty Plc for about $2.6 billion, Bloomberg News reported. Three years later, and the former Tarmac business is on life support. Carillion has lost 70 percent of its market value this week after flagging 845 million pounds ($1.09 billion) in surprise contract provisions.

The eurozone’s trade in goods surplus inched up in May as import and export values both grew on the back of another bumper performance in Germany, the Financial Times reported. Official trade figures from Eurostat show the bloc’s seasonally adjusted surplus in goods rose 2.1 per cent from €18.6bn to €19.7bn in May. The reading was just below an average forecast of €20bn. The eurozone’s trade balance has been in surplus since 2012 – the aftermath of the continent’s debt crisis – as governments have driven themselves to become more competitive.

The official who looks after bankrupts’ affairs is seeking to have the bankruptcy period of a Co Westmeath businessman extended over an alleged lack of cooperation and concerns about assets transfers, the Irish Times reported. The business affairs of Patrick J Daly include an investment in a property in Panama in 2006 that was lost through fraud, and which featured in a murder trial in the Central American country in which the fraudsters were convicted of murdering a local politician after he discovered what they were up to.

Denmark's state prosecutor charged the former manager of OW Bunker's Singapore subsidiary with fraud on Thursday but cleared the Danish management of the failed marine fuel oil supplier of any criminal wrongdoing. OW Bunker filed for bankruptcy in Denmark in November 2014 after losses at its Singapore business Dynamic Oil Trading, a marked change of fortunes for a firm valued at $1 billion when it listed in March that year, Reuters reported.

What was that about the end of “deflationary forces” in the eurozone? While the rest of the eurozone shows tentative signs of a self-sustaining increase in prices, Ireland’s economy returned to deflation in June, and economists at the local central bank are blaming the country’s reliance on trade with the UK, the Financial Times reported. While a weak pound has led to uncomfortably high inflation in the UK, its post-Brexit referendum depreciation has created the opposite problem in Ireland.

The availability of consumer credit in the UK economy tightened in the second quarter and is expected to decline further as banks turn cautious amid a worsening in Britain’s economic outlook, according to the Bank of England. Retail banks and other lenders told the BoE they had cut back on the supply of unsecured lending – which includes credit card loans – in the three months to the end of June, the Financial Times reported.