"There will be absolutely no move away from the free market mechanism."

These are the words used by Turkey's Finance Minister Lutfi Elvan in an attempt to reassure investors after the country's currency and stock market tumbled on Monday.

After Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's abrupt decision to fire his market-friendly central bank chief Naci Agbal, the lira lost nearly 15 percent against the dollar on the first day of trading.

"We will continue with determination to implement the liberal exchange system," said Elvan, trying to calm the financial turmoil.

Agbal was in the post for just five months and the reasons for his dismissal aren't known, but it followed the central bank's recent to raise its benchmark interest rate by a larger-than-expected 200 basis points to 19 percent. Erdogan has once described high interest rates as the "mother and father of all evil."

Elsewhere, Deliveroo is on course to become the biggest London flotation in almost a decade, seeking a market valuation of up to $12.2 billion. The London-based business has been booming amid lockdown measures.

After the world celebrated International Forest Day on Sunday, the climate disclosure platform CDP shared the results of a survey showing that businesses are not doing enough to protect against deforestation, an issue that is expected to cause billions in losses for global firms. In our graph today, we bring you data on how much forest land covers each EU member state – so that you can keep an eye on future initiatives to protect it.

As vaccines continue to be a hot top on the markets and in wider society, scroll down for our video explaining what scientists are trying to achieve by creating a "universal vaccine."

Read on for more of the day's business news in full. 

Giulia Carbonaro

Digital correspondent 

P.S. Did someone forward this to you?

 Sign up here

The Turkish lira has plunged more than 15 percent in early Asian trading, after a shock decision by President Erdogan over the weekend to oust his central bank governor. Naci Agbal was removed from the post after raising interest rates by 200 basis points to 19 percent last week. He has been replaced by a banking professor and former lawmaker with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) Sahap Kavcıoglu. The lira is now trading at 7.86 to the dollar, a few points below its record low it reached before Agbal took office last November.    

Home food delivery giant Deliveroo says it is seeking a valuation of up to $12.2 billion when it starts selling its shares on the London Stock Exchange. The listing, expected soon, looks set to be the biggest flotation on the UK markets in years. Deliveroo says the total value of orders it received in January and February of this year was up 121 percent on the figure in 2020.

Chinese social media platform ByteDance says its video games unit Nuverse is to buy the gaming studio Moonton Technology. As part of a roll-out into the video games business, ByteDance will acquire the Shanghai-based firm in a deal valued at around $4 billion.

The UK's competition watchdog is to investigate the $2.18 billion takeover of the publishing group Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House. Penguin, which is owned by Bertelsmann, the world's biggest bookseller, outbid Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for control of Simon & Schuster last year. The Competition and Markets Authority says it is considering whether the deal would result in a "substantial lessening of competition" in the bookselling market.

Ikea France is going on trial on Monday for spying on employees and job applicants using private detectives and police officers. The court is investigating Ikea's practices between 2009 and 2012, but prosecutors say they started nearly a decade earlier.

U.S. private equity giant Blackstone has launched a takeover bid for scandal-tainted Crown Resorts, just weeks after the Australian group was denied a license to run a multi-billion-dollar Sydney casino, the gaming group said on Monday.

Deforestation will cause global agri-businesses a $53bn loss, says climate-disclosure platform Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). A survey looking at 553 firms sourcing commodities such as cattle and soybeans found that not enough work has been done to protect forests. The extreme weather-related risks caused by forest loss are expected to cost companies $6.6bn in the coming years.

READ MORE

Are we alone in the universe?

Shipping 'ready for key role in vaccine delivery'

French PM gets AstraZeneca vaccine

WATCH: Scientists are seeking to develop a so-called "universal vaccine" against COVID-19 that will provide protection in the long run, even from coronaviruses we haven't yet seen. But how would that work and is it even achievable?

With the price of many cryptocurrencies hitting record highs on a seemingly weekly basis, we asked Laith Khalaf, financial analyst at stockbroker AJ Bell, whether investing in cryptocurrencies is set to become a mainstream activity.

Is Bitcoin a risky venture and exactly just how cautious should we be?

It is, yes – you just need to look at the price quality to tell that. You know, I'm going to quote Warren Buffett here: 'Don't invest in something that you don't understand.' That's kind of one of the basic tenets of investing. I'd also point to what the financial regulator in the UK said, which is don't invest any money in cryptocurrency that you're not prepared to lose. And that's really the bottom line – the future course of these cryptocurrencies is very unpredictable, which is acknowledged by even fairly bullish investors like Tesla.

Cryptocurrency block chains should be completely safe, shouldn't they? But many people don't seem to trust the cryptocurrency world. Why is that?

Well, I think that's probably for a number of reasons. One we've touched on is they don't perhaps fully understand it. And if you don't understand something, then it's natural to be slightly kind of skeptical about it. Obviously, there have been issues with Bitcoin being so anonymous, linked to issues in terms of money laundering and obviously criminal activity. So that's one reason. But on the flip side of that, you know, at the same time, we've got central banks manipulating traditional currencies. And so there is one kind of anti-establishment point of view, which is that actually Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not subject to this manipulation. So in some ways, they've got more integrity.

And finally... Forests play a crucial role in preventing climate-related disasters, as well as in storing carbon - good reasons to protect them. In 2020, the EU had an estimated 159 million hectares of forests, an area that has increased by almost 10 percent since 1990.