Labour strife and staffing shortages have European airports clamouring to find more workers, minimize cancelled flights and reduce headaches for travellers during the busy summer season, Reuters reported. Workers at France's Charles De Gaulle airport are set to strike on Thursday for more pay, with a quarter of flights cancelled. In Italy, crews from budget carriers Ryanair, easyJet and Volotea walked off the job on Wednesday. Ryanair cabin crew could strike in Europe this summer, after talks ended with two Spanish unions, according to a statement by unions SITCPLA and USO.

We.trade, one of the earliest blochcain coalitions for trade finance is entering insolvency after its banking shareholders pulled the plug, Finextra.com reported. The company was formed in 2017 as a consortium that eventually included a dozen major banks such as Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Santander, Societe Generale and UBS. Yesterday the Irish Independent reported that the company is winding down its operations and has has proposed appointing PwC as a liquidator.

The U.S. Treasury moved to block U.S. investors from making purchases of Russian debt in secondary markets, an apparent expansion from existing policy that only prohibited purchases of newly issued Russian government debt and some Russian corporate debts, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. In new guidance, the Treasury Department said U.S.

The Financial Reporting Council fined PricewaterhouseCoopers on Tuesday after the U.K. audit and accounting regulator found issues with the firm’s audits of two construction groups, the Wall Street Journal reported. The FRC said it imposed sanctions of roughly £5 million—equivalent to about $6.3 million—for failings in PwC’s audits of Galliford Try Holdings PLC and Kier Group PLC, which have market caps of around £191 million and £345 million, respectively. PwC in a statement expressed regret that certain audits weren’t up to standards and said it has worked to improve audit quality.

Relocating euro clearing from London to the European Union must be "market-led" rather than mandatory, with the shift already well underway, the head of Eurex Clearing said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. After Brexit, the European Union has said it will not allow EU market participants to clear euro derivatives in London after June 2025, citing a need to end its heavy reliance on that market in the same way the bloc is cutting dependency on Russian energy.

Britain will begin live testing of crypto blockchain technology for traditional market activities such as trading and settlement of stocks and bonds next year as part of a drive to become a global "crypto hub", the finance ministry said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Gwyneth Nurse, the ministry's director general for financial services, said the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT), which underpins cryptoassets, is a key priority for making financial market infrastructure more innovative and efficient for users.

Bondholders are in for a tangled mess of financial, political and legal wrangling if sanctions push Russia to a historic default, Bloomberg News reported. So far, Moscow has been able to navigate the restrictions to service its international debt, but that’s likely to change after the US closed another avenue to creditors, affecting about $100 million in payments due on May 27. The European Union has also sanctioned Russia’s central depository, which said it would suspend euro-denominated transactions.

Hungary plans to offer bonds in euros and dollars as Prime Minister Viktor Orban seeks alternatives to billions of euros in blocked European Union funding, Bloomberg News reported. Hungary is seeking to sell seven-year and 12-year benchmark-sized bonds in dollars and nine-year bonds in euros in the near future, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to speak about it. BNP Paribas SA, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., ING Groep NV and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are to arrange the sale, the person said.

Insolvency and restructuring specialists in the U.K. are preparing for a flurry of activity as supply chain issues, spiraling energy costs and rising inflation trigger a wave of corporate distress and bankruptcies, the Telegram reported. The signs are already ominous. During the first three months of the year, around 137,000 businesses closed their doors for good in the UK, a jump of nearly a quarter on the same period in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

An already tough year for sterling corporate credit may get worse as Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces a crunch no-confidence vote, Bloomberg News reported. Borrowing costs for UK companies are at the highest since 2014, while an index of sterling corporate credit is on its longest losing run ever, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. With surging inflation and an uncertain economic outlook on the horizon, what markets don’t need right now is more uncertainty.