The Irish government plans to launch a new financial support scheme for businesses that have seen their revenues devastated by Covid-19 lockdown restrictions but don’t qualify for the Covid Restrictions Support Scheme (CRSS), the Irish Times reported. The CRSS is available to businesses that were required to prohibit or considerably restrict customers from accessing their business premises as part of Covid-19 restrictions.
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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
Bespoke Hotels Group has defended its decision to resort to beginning insolvency proceedings for four of its hotels, Boutique Hotelier reported. Staff at The Lyndene and St Chads in Blackpool, The Townhouse in Manchester and The Duke in Plymouth were notified on Wednesday that they had all been made redundant. Bespoke Hotels said that the appointment of an insolvency practitioner was a last resort, after months of looking for alternative financial solutions.
Aer Lingus has secured €150 million from the State-backed Ireland Strategic Investment Fund’s (Isif) pandemic recovery scheme, the Irish Times reported. The three-year loan will be used to strengthen the airline’s liquidity position as it seeks to deal with the impact of the Covid crisis. Isif, which operates under the umbrella of the National Treasury Management Agency, said the loan was agreed on commercial terms. Rival airline Ryanair has been critical of State supports availed of by competitors across Europe.
German carrier Deutsche Lufthansa AG sold 1.6 billion-euros ($1.92 billion) of bonds on Thursday to partly repay a government bailout that kept it afloat after the pandemic severely disrupted international travel, Bloomberg News reported. Lufthansa will use 500 million euros to refinance financial liabilities due this year, and the rest of the funds will repay part of a 3 billion-euro loan from state development bank KfW, the company said in an emailed statement.
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Services companies in the U.S. and Asia gained ground in January, while a continued contraction in the eurozone threatened a double-dip recession, surveys of purchasing managers showed, the Wall Street Journal reported. The eurozone economy shrank in the final three months of last year amid high Covid-19 infection rates and related restrictions posed the risk of a double-dip recession. Surveys compiled by data firm IHS Markit released Wednesday showed the eurozone’s service sector fell to 45.0 from 46.4 in December.
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Bayer AG struck a $2 billion deal to resolve future legal claims that its widely used weedkiller Roundup causes cancer, the German company said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Bayer has been struggling to finalize the settlement of claims that Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer. Bayer inherited the business and the litigation as part of a $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto in 2018. The company has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and glyphosate are safe for human use.
Commerzbank AG’s restructuring plan echoes that of its biggest rival Deutsche Bank AG, but without the latter’s debt-trading profit engine to pull it through, Bloomberg News reported. The Frankfurt-based lender said late Wednesday that it expects to post a loss of about 2.9 billion euros ($3.5 billion) for 2020, reflecting lower asset values and the cost of cutting about 10,000 jobs. The loss exceeds the 2.7 billion euros that analysts had estimated, and stands in contrast to Deutsche Bank’s announcement Thursday of its first annual profit since 2014.
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The Bank of England has told British banks that they should take whatever steps are necessary to prepare their systems for negative interest rates, opening up a pathway for the central bank to use this additional policy tool to encourage more lending, the New York Times reported. But policymakers cautioned on Thursday that they were not trying to send the signal that rates would be cut to zero or lower imminently. The markets responded accordingly: The British pound and bond yields rose as traders pared back expectations for a future rate cut.
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Two British brothers are on the cusp of tying up the financing for their takeover of grocer Asda, the U.K.’s largest leveraged buyout in more than a decade, Bloomberg News reported. In a deal that could shake up Britain’s highly competitive grocery market, Zuber and Mohsin Issa and TDR Capital will pay less than a billion pounds of their own money to gain control of Asda in a transaction valuing the country’s third-largest grocer at 6.8 billion pounds ($9.2 billion). The Issas and TDR struck a deal with Walmart Inc. to take control of Asda in October, with the U.S.
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Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, became a hero to financial markets and the European Union after he defused the continent’s debt crisis by promising to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro, the Wall Street Journal reported. That could turn out to be the easy part. Mr. Draghi must now show he has what it takes to become Italy’s next prime minister, convince the country’s fractious parties to back him, and reverse a long economic decline in the depths of the worst pandemic in a century. The euro’s future could once again hinge on how Mr. Draghi fares.