Spain’s largest hotel chain Melia Hotels has filed a complaint against the government with an administrative court seeking 116 million euros ($138 million) in damages incurred due to last year’s COVID-19 restrictions, the company said, Reuters reported. A spokeswoman for the group said on Wednesday the claim was related to losses suffered as a result of the government-imposed lockdown between mid-March and late June of 2020, confirming a report by the newspaper Expansion.
Resources Per Country
- Albania
- Austria
- Belarus
- Belgium
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bulgaria
- Croatia
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Gibraltar
- Greece
- Guernsey
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Ireland
- Isle of Man
- Italy
- Jersey
- Kosovo
- Latvia
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Macedonia
- Malta
- Moldova
- Monaco
- Montenegro
- Netherlands
- Norway
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Russia
- San Marino
- Serbia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Ukraine
- United Kingdom
- Vatican City
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The fall in French corporate insolvencies during the coronavirus pandemic reflects extensive government support that has masked disparate performances among SMEs, as has the stability of corporates’ aggregate net debt, according to a Fitch Ratings report. Fitch expects arrears and defaults among SMEs to increase as support is withdrawn and this is reflected in the firm's French SME CLO performance expectations, which already incorporate pandemic-related stresses.
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Bond investors bracing for Czech rate hikes are finding a silver lining in the latest bond selloff, Bloomberg News reported. Primary dealers bid for more than 30 billion koruna ($1.37 billion) of Czech government bonds due in 2030 at an auction on Wednesday, the highest demand for a note with about 10 years in maturity since May. The rush reflects the juicy yield premium that the battered securities now offer over equivalent German bunds.
Up to 1,500 former Thomas Cook workers are in line for awards of thousands of pounds each following an employment tribunal judgement, the TSSA announced today, the Morning Star reported. The transport union said that a decision on the collapsed travel firm’s failure to consult before making redundancies opens the way for former employees to claim as much as £4,200 each from the Insolvency Service.
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Greece attracted bumper demand in its first sale of 30-year bonds since 2008, completing the country’s full return to debt markets, Bloomberg News reported. The nation drew in more than 26 billion euros ($31 billion) of orders for its 2.5 billion-euro sale via banks. That showed investors’ long-term confidence and appetite for a yield at nearly 2% that is the highest in the euro area. The demand, just shy of a record set earlier this year, allowed Greece to cut pricing by 10 basis points from initial guidance.
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Polish central bank has ramped up its quantitative-easing program, buying the most debt at a single auction since July in a bid to keep a lid on borrowing costs, Bloomberg News reported. The purchases worth 3.75 billion zloty ($968 million) included 1.5 billion zloty of notes issued by state-run lender BGK and seven series of government bonds maturing from 2024 to 2030, according to auction results published on the National Bank of Poland’s page on Bloomberg.
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Germany’s financial regulator Bafin has submitted a filing to a court in Bremen to start insolvency proceedings for Greensill Bank, a spokeswoman for the court said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Greensill Bank was locked down by BaFin this month with a warning that there was an imminent risk that its debt would become unmanageable. The regulator also questioned some of the bank’s financial accounts. “We received an application from BaFin yesterday (Monday) evening to open insolvency proceedings regarding Greensill Bank AG,” a spokeswoman for the district court told Reuters.
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A German court on Tuesday declared that a small bank tied to a collapsed U.K. finance company was insolvent, triggering losses for dozens of small German towns, the Wall Street Journal reported. Greensill Bank AG was deemed insolvent by a local court, leaving the towns as creditors that will likely sustain losses. Around Germany, at least 12 towns with a combined €200 million, equivalent to about $238 million, in deposits are in the same situation. Individual depositors are covered by insurance. Among them is Mengen, a tiny municipality in southwestern Germany.
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The European Central Bank is shielding the euro-zone economy from higher bond yields partly because the region is rolling out its fiscal stimulus too slowly, according to policy maker Peter Kazimir, Bloomberg News reported. While the rise in euro-area government bond yields this year isn’t “dramatic for now,” the Slovakian central bank governor said the ECB wanted to shore up confidence that the region wouldn’t suffer from higher borrowing costs sparked by the $1.9 trillion U.S. fiscal package. “My concern is that, compared with the enormous U.S.
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Poland’s increasingly rickety right-wing governing coalition has split over the €672.5 billion COVID Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) — potentially endangering a project that has to be approved by all 27 EU countries before going into effect, Politico reported. The RFF is part of the EU’s €750 billion Next Generation EU package, aimed at pulling the bloc out of the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, as well as boosting key priorities like the green energy transformation. The ruling United Right coalition is dominated by Law and Justice (PiS) with two smaller parties.
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