In her last New Year’s address as chancellor, Angela Merkel called on Germans to remain disciplined in the fight against the coronavirus, Bloomberg News reported. The German leader -- who will step down after elections in September -- said that perseverance would be needed during a harsh winter as a vaccination campaign ramps up. Amid concerns about its safety, she said she would get the shot as soon as it’s her turn. Germany is struggling to contain the spread of Covid-19, like many of its neighbors.

An easyJet board member has resigned following scrutiny over her role at Wirecard, the collapsed German payments company. Anastassia Lauterbach quit on Monday as a non-executive director of the low-cost carrier with immediate effect after less than two years’ service, the Financial Times reported. Her exit came days after influential shareholder advisory group ISS questioned her place on the board, given that she had been a member of the supervisory board of Wirecard, the scandal-hit German company that filed for insolvency in June after revealing a multiyear frau

Germany has been accused of providing unfair state aid to Europe’s largest railway company Deutsche Bahn in a complaint to the EU Commission, the Financial Times reported. Transport provider FlixMobility has filed the complaint, saying Berlin has delayed a request to Brussels to allow a €5bn capital increase to Deutsche Bahn because of fears it will be rejected for breaking state aid rules.

An EY anti-fraud team warned in 2018 that “red-flag indicators” at Wirecard pointed to potential accounting manipulation and required further investigation, according to documents seen by the Financial Times. Just weeks later, the separate EY team in charge of Wirecard’s annual audit decided against investigating the matter further and subsequently issued an unqualified audit, the Financial Times reported. Wirecard, a once high-flying German payments group, this summer collapsed into insolvency in one of Europe’s biggest postwar accounting frauds.

Germany is heading for a double-dip recession this winter after Berlin imposed a hard lockdown, economists have predicted, denting hopes that Europe’s largest economy will rebound to pre-pandemic levels by the start of 2022, the Financial Times reported. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government announced at the weekend that schools and most shops would be closed from Wednesday until January 10 in an effort to contain a surge in coronavirus infections. “Germany must brace itself for a second recession,” said Jörg Krämer, chief economist at Commerzbank.

The parties in Germany’s ruling coalition have agreed to extend a freeze on insolvency rules put in place to avoid a wave of corporate bankruptcies due to the coronavirus crisis, officials said on Monday, Reuters reported. In March, the government offered respite to companies that find themselves in financial trouble due to the pandemic by allowing them to delay filing for bankruptcy until the end of September. The coalition parties later agreed to extend the insolvency waiver until the end of this year for indebted but still solvent companies.

Germany has promised to investigate after the head of the body that regulates auditors told lawmakers he had traded in Wirecard shares weeks before the payment services company collapsed amid massive fraud allegations, Reuters reported. As head of audit regulator APAS, Ralf Bose was responsible for regulating EY, which audited Wirecard’s accounts for years until the company collapsed following the discovery of a 1.9 billion euro ($2.3 billion) hole in its accounts.

Financial engineering, like life, moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it. Few companies have had to move faster this year than Tui, whose AGM presentation in mid February mentioned coronavirus only once, the Financial Times reported. “At present, we do not see any significant impact from the virus on our outlook,” chief executive Fritz Joussen told shareholders.

Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank provided the bulk of the funding for Wirecard’s acquisition of a pair of Indian companies referred to in the fraud allegations against the defunct Germany payments group, documents seen by the Financial Times reveal. In 2015 Wirecard turned to the German banks when it agreed to pay up to €340m to a Mauritius-based fund for two India-based sister companies, Hermes i Tickets and GI Technology, the Financial Times reported.