IAG, the owner of British Airways and low-cost carrier Vueling, is one of the four bidders selected for the final stages of talks over the assets of insolvent Austrian airline Niki, Reuters reported. IAG had made an offer for Niki as a whole and was the frontrunner in talks for the carrier, the three sources told Reuters. If no deal is struck with IAG, it is possible that Niki will be carved up among several buyers. British tour operator Thomas Cook and Niki’s founder, former Formula One world champion Niki Lauda, are also among the four, Lauda told German daily Handelsblatt.

Air Berlin’s unit Niki can keep its valuable runway slots while Austria’s Transport Ministry examines its insolvency filing, the airspace regulator said amid growing interest in the carrier from potential bidders, Reuters reported. Niki filed for insolvency last week after Germany’s Lufthansa, which is buying other parts of Air Berlin, scrapped plans to buy Niki, grounding the airline’s fleet and stranding thousands of passengers. Niki’s workers’ council chief said on Dec.

Bidders for insolvent airline Niki have until Thursday to submit their offers for the Austrian unit of collapsed Air Berlin, its administrator said on Monday, Reuters reported. “None of the possible buyers have presented a binding, fully financed offer, but there are indications of interest,” Lucas Floether told German news agency DPA. “We have set a deadline for binding offers for midday on Thursday,” he said, while declining to provide details on the bidders.

Austrian airline Niki said on Wednesday it had paid all bills owed to a tour operator and it therefore expected to avert bankruptcy proceedings which have hit parent Air Berlin, Reuters reported. Law firm Kosch & Partner said earlier it had applied for insolvency proceedings against Niki on behalf of an Austrian tour operator which said it was owed money by Niki. The law firm declined to identify the tour operator. “We have reviewed the relevant post, and the claim has been settled,” Niki said in an email to Reuters.

Austria became the first European country to use a new law to share losses of a failed bank with senior creditors as it slashed the value of debt owed by Heta Asset Resolution AG, Bloomberg News reported. The Austrian banking regulator cut Heta’s senior liabilities by 54 percent and extended the maturities of all eligible debt to Dec. 31, 2023, it said in a statement published on its website on Sunday, to help cover an 8 billion-euro ($9.1 billion) hole in Heta’s balance sheet.

An attempt by the Austrian province of Carinthia to avert the threat of insolvency has failed as too few creditors accepted its offer to buy back a failed bank's bonds at a discount, a person with knowledge of the total said on Friday. Carinthia guaranteed local bank Hypo Alpe Adria's bonds before the lender collapsed and the so-called bad bank Heta Asset Resolution was formed to wind it down. The province wants to repurchase the bonds at a discount to their face value of 10.8 billion euros ($12.1 billion) to avoid having to honour those guarantees, which it says it cannot afford.

Creditors of Heta Asset Resolution AG who say they control more than 5 billion euros ($5.5 billion) of the bad bank’s debt won’t sell at a discount, highlighting the battle Austria faces as it tries to share losses with creditors and prevent a provincial insolvency, Bloomberg News reported. The Austrian state of Carinthia, which has guaranteed 11 billion euros of Heta’s debt and is offering to buy it up for about 3 billion euros less than the face value, is able to fully pay up, the creditors said in a statement on Thursday.

The Austrian supermarket chain Zielpunkt is formally beginning insolvency proceedings with the Vienna court of commerce, The Local reported. Nearly 3,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs before Christmas. Zielpunkt's owner, Upper Austrian businessman Georg Pfeiffer, has been accused of deliberately letting the business fail after gaining control of dozens of Zielpunkt properties and of timing the insolvency filing for the end of November so that he could avoid paying Christmas bonuses to the chain's employees (saving him around €18 million).

Heta Asset Resolution AG, the Austrian “bad bank” that unveiled a 7 billion-euro ($8 billion) capital hole Wednesday, said an insolvency may ultimately be the only way to shut down the company, Bloomberg News reported. Heta, the remnant of the failed, nationalized Hypo Alpe-Adria-Bank International AG, warned on Thursday that the insolvency remains on the table even as a debt moratorium imposed by regulators staved it off for now.

The media in Austria's larger northern neighbor once envied the country's economic success, dubbing it ''the better Germany.'' Things are different now, Bloomberg News reported. Since that title was applied in a Stern magazine article in 2005, annual GDP growth in Austria has slid downward, to 0.1 percent last year from well above 2 percent then. Having outpaced the euro area's biggest economy for most of the past 15 years, the Alpine republic is now lagging behind Germany, also its most important export market.