The European Central Bank has urged Commerzbank to speed up its restructuring efforts with the region’s top financial regulator expressing concern about lacklustre profitability and a bloated cost base at Germany’s second-largest listed lender, the Financial Times reported. The unusually frank assessment of the strategy of a bank that meets all key regulatory requirements was made by an unnamed ECB official who attended a Commerzbank supervisory board meeting, people familiar with events told the Financial Times.

Deutsche Bank AG and SSG Capital Management have made a joint bid for an Indian power producer’s debt of 60 billion rupees ($842 million), according to a person familiar with the matter, Bloomberg News reported. The consortium has submitted a binding bid of about 31 billion rupees for the delinquent debt of Chennai-based Coastal Energen Pvt., the person said, asking not to be named as the information isn’t public. The bid seeks a haircut of about 50% on the company’s debt, excluding outstanding accrued interest, the person said.

German pharma company Aenova is being overhauled by owner BC Partners, which is placing a new capital structure to strengthen the company and increase investor confidence, banking sources said, Reuters reported. Aenova returned to Europe’s leveraged loan market for the first time in 5.5 years, launching a €440m term loan B on February 3 to refinance some of its existing debt. In addition to the new term loan, BC Partners is also injecting €100m of new equity into Aenova and has also raised €100m of subordinated, preplaced PIK.

A sharp fall in German factory orders has confounded hopes of a rebound in the eurozone economy as the head of the European Central Bank warned that it had limited scope to cut interest rates further, the Financial Times reported. Christine Lagarde said on Thursday that the low rates, low inflation and low growth environment in the eurozone had “significantly reduced the scope for the ECB and other central banks worldwide to ease monetary policy” if another crisis was to strike.

Germany’s government has proposed a clampdown on anti-competitive behaviour by digital platforms, putting Berlin in the vanguard of European efforts to regulate companies including Google and Amazon, the Financial Times reported. The draft “digital law” will strengthen the intervention powers of Germany’s competition watchdog, the Federal Cartel Office. Peter Altmaier, the economy minister, said the measures would “toughen control of abusive practices for big market-dominating digital companies”.

Dublin-based Depfa Bank’s weakness as a “structurally lossmaking” business has been highlighted by two debt-ratings firms as the German government pursues a second attempt to sell the company, The Irish Times reported. “Given that Depfa’s recurring revenue is insufficient to cover its cost base, we believe that – without outside assistance – Depfa has limited scope to engineer a sustainable turnaround and will therefore likely remain lossmaking in the medium to long term, although there may be potential to reduce losses,” Moody’s said in a note published last week.

Leoni AG, a 450-year-old company that traces its roots to precious-metal threads for embroidery, is seeking salvation through an unusual modern financing tool, Bloomberg News reported. The worst performing stock among major companies in Germany in the last year, Leoni is considering an audacious refinancing package, in part by preparing to sell about 200 million euros ($220 million) worth of receivables. It’s a transaction known as factoring that would let it pay back a 170-million-euro Schuldschein, or promissory note, due in March.

Deutsche Bank reported a whopping loss for the last three months of 2019 and for the full year as it cut staff and wrote down the value of assets, affirming its status as one of Europe’s most troubled big lenders, the International New York Times reported. The bank said it lost 1.5 billion euros, or $1.6 billion, in the last three months of 2019, bringing the total loss for the year to €5.3 billion. In 2018, the bank effectively broke even for the year and in the fourth quarter.

Germany is working on a draft law on reducing risks in the banking sector which foresees the participation of creditors and shareholders in the event of a bankruptcy, the finance ministry said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The draft law provides for big banks to put aside 8% of their balance sheet total as a buffer during a crisis, the finance ministry said. The draft law is meant to implement parts of a wider European Union package of banking rules, which was agreed by member states last year, into national law.

German business confidence unexpectedly dropped in January, cooling hopes that the downturn in the export-led manufacturing sector was on track to stabilise, the Financial Times reported. The Ifo Institute, a Munich-based think-tank, said its measure showing sentiment among the 9,000 German companies it surveys every month had declined to 95.9 in January, from 96.3 in December. That contrasts to economists’ expectations in a Reuters poll of a rise to 97.