Thousands of French company chiefs took the streets on Monday in a rare protest against what they see as excessive taxes and red tape strangling activity in the euro zone’s second largest economy, the Irish Times reported. The protests in Paris and the southwestern city of Toulouse are the first in a week of demonstrations organised by employer groups before the December 10th unveiling of a law President Francois Hollande’s government hopes will boost investment and jobs.

Vivarte SAS’s loans tumbled to their lowest levels since the French retailer was taken over by creditors last month, according to three people familiar with the matter. The company’s 800 million euros ($997 million) of senior loans fell to 63 cents on the euro, down about 20 cents since the start of November, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The loans are part of Vivarte’s remaining debt after lenders wrote off about 2 billion euros in a restructuring that completed on Oct. 29.

French public passenger transport group Transdev, owned by Veolia and state bank CDC, is to call in loans to its France-Corsica ferry operator unit SNCM next week, it said on Friday, pushing the unit into filing for court protection from insolvency, Reuters reported. Transdev's owners have said court protection from creditors is the only way to shield the loss-making ferry operator from two separate European Union state aid repayment claims totalling 440 million euros.

Italy and France backed away from a clash with the European Commission over their 2015 budgets on Monday by pledging extra measures to cut their deficits, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move comes after the commission, the European Union’s executive arm, warned Rome and Paris last week that their budget plans would violate its fiscal rules.

Germany and France have tapped a prominent economist from each country for policy advice to counter “the risk of a lost decade in Europe” in an attempt to bridge the growing divide between the two countries over how to revive flagging economic growth in Europe. German Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel and French Economy and Industry Minister Emmanuel Macron recently solicited help from French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry and Henrik Enderlein, lecturers at the Berlin-based Hertie School of Governance, in separate letters seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Ever since the French government unveiled its 2015 budget two weeks ago, fiscal enforcers in Brussels have attempted to convince Paris it must do more – making additional spending cuts and implementing more reforms – for them to accept the plan, the Financial Times reported. In recent days, as the prospect of an EU rejection became imminent, the discussions moved beyond the normal economic channels, pulling in members of the still-to-be-approved European Commission, including Jean-Claude Juncker, its incoming president, and Frenchman Pierre Moscovici, his economic nominee.

Euro Disney has agreed a €1 billion funding deal backed by its largest shareholder, the Walt Disney, which includes a share sale and a debt restructuring, to allow it to invest in the business, the Irish Times reported. Euro Disney, the entertainment resort based in an eastern suburb of Paris, is 40 per cent owned by parent Walt Disney (DIS.N) and 10 per cent by the Saudi prince AlWaleed bin Talal. As part of the offer Walt Disney would be required to launch a tender offer on Euro Disney shares.

The European Union is preparing to reject France’s 2015 budget, according to European officials, setting up a clash that would be the biggest test yet of new powers for Brussels that were designed to prevent a repeat of the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said last month that his country would run a budget deficit of 4.3% of gross domestic product next year—far from the 3% deficit it had previously pledged.

After a two-week pilots' strike that inconvenienced nearly a million passengers and caused Air France to lose an estimated 280 million euros, the airline was slowly returning to the skies on Monday, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. It was unclear what the pilots had achieved from the strike, other than to delay severely the return to profitability for the French-Dutch parent company, Air France-KLM, and to curb the company’s ambitions for growth in Europe’s fiercely competitive regional market.

Despite bowing to an important union demand, Air France-KLM remained crippled on Thursday by an 11-day-old pilots’ strike, the International New York Times reported.