The French government and the European Commission have reached an agreement in principle on fresh financial support for Air France, which has been hurt by a drop in air travel since the start of the pandemic, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Sunday, Bloomberg News reported. “It’s very good news for Air France, it’s very good news for the whole French aviation sector,” Le Maire said in an interview on LCI television. “It was a long and difficult negotiation, but I think we’ve reached a good agreement” with EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

Romanian low-cost airline Blue Air will resume its plans put on ice during the pandemic. The company plans to issue bonds within several months after it exits the pre-insolvency procedures, hopefully in July 2022, and to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) within two to three years, the company's CEO Oana Petrescu said in an interview, Romania-Insider.com reported. Romania's biggest airline by the number of passengers transported, Blue Air, initiated last July the preventive agreement, a mechanism that gives a company facing cash flow problems a chance to avoid insolvency.

Germany’s banking private banking association said on Monday that it had paid out around 2.7 billion euros ($3.17 billion) to more than 20,500 Greensill Bank customers as part of its deposit guarantee scheme after the bank collapsed last month, Reuters reported. The banking association said only a few customers had yet to receive compensation under the protection fund, which protects individuals but not institutional investors. Read more.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday he was very hopeful the government could find a solution for Liberty Steel which is scrambling to secure capital after the collapse of its biggest lender Greensill Capital, Reuters reported. The steelmaker, which employs 3,000 people in Britain and is part of the GFG Alliance conglomerate, has been rocked by the failure of Greensill, which had extended many billions of dollars in loans.

U.K. businesses owned by ethnic minorities risk missing out on the post-pandemic economic rebound, exacerbating existing inequalities that were exposed by the coronavirus, Bloomberg News reported. A survey by the British Business Bank in October found 61% of Asian and other minority-owned enterprises had paused or permanently stopped work because of Covid-19. The figure was one and a half times that for White-owned businesses.

The ECB’s massive bond-buying programme has fuelled a bonanza in euro zone sovereign debt, with some investors vastly overstating their orders at debt sales in a bid to secure the coveted paper. But now some governments are starting to say, enough is enough, Reuters reported. Borrowers including the European Union, France and Spain are moving to rein in orders from hedge funds in their syndicated bond sales, a government official and four banking sources involved in the deals told Reuters.

German towns and cities are pulling money from small, private banks, spooked after losing millions in the closure of Greensill Bank, an experience they said has shattered their faith in the country’s government and financial system, Reuters reported. Part of financier Lex Greensill’s insolvent Greensill Capital, the bank collapsed this month and triggered a 2 billion euro ($2.34 billion) bill for Germany’s deposit protection scheme. But towns and cities are excluded from this shield and are nursing losses of hundreds of millions of euros.

Credit Suisse Group AG is seeking to push one of Sanjeev Gupta’s key commodities-trading units into insolvency, presenting a new threat to his metal empire after the collapse of his biggest lender, YahooFinance reported. The application to wind up Liberty Commodities Ltd. was filed in the U.K.’s insolvency court late Tuesday by a unit of Citigroup Inc. Citi was acting under instructions from Credit Suisse, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

On Friday, 26 March 2021, the Belgian Insolvency Law was amended with the introduction of a pre-packaged insolvency procedure, allowing the debtor to discretely prepare for judicial reorganisation proceedings under the supervision of a judicial administrator, according to an analysis on JDSupra.com. Other noteworthy changes include (i) a lower threshold for the opening of judicial reorganisation proceedings, and (ii) the more flexible appointment of judicial administrators.