Panorama, one of two major Berlin-based fashion fairs, has filed for insolvency following its relocation in January, FashionUnited reported. Panorama Fashion Fair Berlin GmbH, represented by its managing director Jörg Wichmann, filed for insolvency proceedings at Berlin’s Charlottenburg District Court on 28 February, according to filings in the German insolvency database. Lawyer Niklas Luetcke has been appointed as provisional insolvency administrator. In January, the fair relocated to Flughafen Tempelhof for the first as it hoped for a fresh start.

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz is considering a move that could open an avenue for limited fiscal stimulus in Europe’s largest economy, Bloomberg News reported. Scholz wants to temporarily suspend the constitutional mechanism that restricts the country’s debt levels in order to provide relief for indebted regions, according to an official familiar with the plans. The initiative, which is likely to face strong political opposition, would shift borrowings from municipalities to the federal government, giving them more budget space to invest locally.

India’s shadow banking crisis and revitalized bankruptcy process are creating new opportunities for Deutsche Bank AG as it steps up lending to cash-strapped tycoons and for purchases of distressed assets, Bloomberg News reported. The German lender is seeing three times the volume of financing deals compared with 2018, when the shadow banking problems erupted, according to Rahul Chawla, the head of global credit trading at Deutsche Bank’s India unit.

Investor sentiment in Germany dropped sharply in February as the effects of the coronavirus outbreak weighed on exporters, a survey revealed, adding to an increasingly gloomy picture for Europe’s biggest economy, the Financial Times reported. The Zew survey of financial market experts found that sentiment about the outlook for the German economy fell 18 points this month to a reading of 8.7. This is well below January’s score of 26.7 and significantly worse than the 21.5 economists in a Reuters poll had been expecting.

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.