Austria

Creditors of A-Tec Industries AG, the insolvent Austrian engineering group, would welcome majority shareholder and Chief Executive Mirko Kovats stepping down, Austrian state broadcaster ORF quoted the spokesman of A-Tec’s creditor committee as saying, Bloomberg News reported today. Kovats’ resignation as CEO “would be beneficial for building trust and it would be very, very acceptable for creditors,” Hans-Georg Kantner of credit protection association KSV Kreditschutzverband von 1870 told ORF radio in an interview.

German public-sector bank BayernLB says it lost nearly €2.62 billion ($3.5 billion) last year - a performance blamed largely on losses and expenses related to former Austrian unit Hypo Group Alpe Adria, The Associated Press reported. The 2009 performance was still an improvement on its huge loss of euro5.08 billion the previous year at the height of the financial crisis. BayernLB said Wednesday that it aims for a "positive result" in 2010. The bank said losses, writedowns and other expenses related to HGAA weighed down its results by a total €3.3 billion last year.

The prospect of an EU intervention in the Greek economy drew a step closer when European finance ministers endorsed a 28-day deadline imposed on its government to show that its budget plan is yielding dividends, The Irish Times reported. With European Central Bank president Jean Claude-Trichet pushing hard for Athens to adopt new budget measures, finance ministers in the wider union backed demands from euro-area ministers for fresh cuts and taxes in four weeks if the current plan is shown to have misfired.

The Netherlands, Germany and Austria have all relied heavily on so-called short-work programs to keep people in their jobs in the wake of the financial crisis. All three have managed to keep unemployment from soaring, but the Dutch have been particularly effective, The Wall Street Journal reported. At 3.7% in October, according to the European Union statistics office, the country's jobless rate is one of the lowest among the world's wealthy nations. After the crisis hit, the Dutch government, labor unions and employers quickly reached an agreement to begin payroll subsidies.

Austria's justice ministry says an investigation has been launched to clarify the circumstances surrounding the near demise of troubled financial institution Hypo Alpe Adria, The Associated Press reported. Austria on Monday nationalized Hypo Alpe Adria, a unit of German public-sector bank BayernLB, to prevent it from sliding into a bankruptcy fueled in part by bad loans - most of them in Eastern Europe. The ministry says prosecutors in the southern city of Klagenfurt are probing whether those responsible for the bank committed breach of trust and fraud.

All cannot be well in the Austrian banking sector despite opposite announcements from the banks themselves, Seeking Alpha reported. Although Raiffeisen Zentralbank, Unicredit subsidiary Bank Austria and Erste Group reported operating profits in Q3 2009 only last week, the latest events from the past weekend suggest that Austria's banks, endangered by their failing ventures in Central and Eastern Europe, are far away from the financially stable positions they wish for themselves.

Bratislava Airport reported that all its past due claims against Slovak low-cost airline SkyEurope Airlines, unpaid on June 22, have been submitted to the court supervising the airline’s restructuring process, The Slovak Spectator reported. On June 22, the Bratislava-based airline was granted protection from creditors, the SITA newswire wrote. Airport spokeswoman Dana Madunická informed SITA that SkyEurope has been settling its obligations within the regime of protection against creditors.

Representatives from Opel's 4,000 dealers in Europe are expected to vote in favor of taking a direct equity stake in the ailing German carmaker when they meet in Vienna on Friday, Reuters reported. The umbrella association Euroda wants all of its dealers to contribute 150 euros from every sold car over the next three years into a joint fund that could raise as much as 500 million euros in fresh equity. Together with Opel's 50,000 European workers, they would like to hold a blocking minority in any new Opel company.

Porsche SE’s controlling shareholders, the Porsche and Piech families, plan to meet in Salzburg, Austria today to hash out how to combine the sports-car maker with Volkswagen AG and reduce €9 billion ($12 billion) of debt, according to two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported. The proposals under consideration include merging the carmakers and finding an investor to buy a stake in the combined company or selling the Porsche AG automotive unit to Volkswagen in return for cash and shares, said one of the people, who declined to be identified because the talks are private.

Austria is not on the brink of default and can cope with any risks caused by the exposure of domestic banks to emerging Europe, Austrian officials said. Austrian banks are among the biggest lenders to formerly Communist areas of central and eastern Europe and have lent the equivalent of 75 percent of its gross domestic product to clients in the region, Forbes reported. 'The creditworthiness of the state of Austria and of the Austrian banking sector is beyond any doubt,' Austrian National Bank Governor Ewald Nowotny said in a statement late on Tuesday.