Europe open: Stocks start session on back foot amid concerns over Covid-19 cases in China
Stocks on the Continent started the week on a down note with selling during the Asian session carrying over into the European open.
Weighing on investor sentiment were reports of more Covid-19 infections having been detected in the People's Republic of China.
Investors were also keeping close tabs on the news-flow around the Nordstream 1 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany which was to be taken off-line for maintenance for 10 days, starting from Monday.
Fears were that it would not be brought back on-line.
As of 0839 BST, the Stoxx 600 was trading 0.97% lower at 413.09, alongside a 1.47% drop for France´s Cac-40 to 5,942.86 while Germany's Dax was 1.34% lower to 12,841.13.
Risk aversion meanwhile fed into US dollar strength with the euro moving lower by 0.64% to 1.0120 versus the Greenback.
In parallel, front-dated Brent crude oil futures were falling 2.04% to $105.0 a barrel on the ICE.
Ten-year euro area periphery government bond yields were well behaved, drifting slightly lower.
Later in the day, Euro area finance ministers were due to meet in Brussels.
There was little in terms of fresh economic data on Monday, although ISTAT did report a 1.9% month-on-month jump in Italian retail sales during the month of May.
At the weekend, European Central Bank governing council member, Robert Holzmann, argued in a newspaper interview in favour of as much as 125 basis points of interest rate hikes by September if the inflation outlook did not improve.
His peer on the council, Greece's Yannis Stournaras meanwhile told Bloomberg on Saturday that a "very good debate" was ongoing as regarded the ECB's future anti-fragmentation tool.
Stournaras further said he hoped that the tool would surprise markets "on the positive side".