German cabin-crew union UFO called for more strikes at Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s low-cost Germanwings unit after the two sides failed to settle a long-running dispute, the Irish Times reported. Workers at Germanwings, which now operates under the Eurowings umbrella, will strike between December 30th and January 1st, the union said. Further strike action will be announced after January 2nd, 2020. The Germanwings brand was folded into Lufthansa’s Eurowings group after a deadly 2015 crash. Passengers are only able to book through the Eurowings brand.

Deutsche Telekom has reached an agreement with its works council on restructuring its troubled T-Systems IT services division, a company spokesman said on Friday, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The spokesman confirmed an earlier report in Handelsblatt that said the agreement included moving large parts of the business to a newly created German subsidiary and affected more than 2,000 staff.

Fears over the impact of a chaotic Brexit left banks in a bind as many small businesses held off on borrowing to invest and nervous households squirrelled away more money – at a time when the European Central Bank (ECB) is charging banks a negative rate of 0.5 per cent to leave excess funds with it, The Irish Times reported. The three bailed-out banks’ combined deposits were €12 billion higher than their loan books in June.

A few weeks ago, Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic party put out a tweet that, depending on your viewpoint, was either naively sincere or shamelessly provocative. Above what looked like a pair of bondage items, the CDU said: “We have a small fetish: solid finances without new debts.” Fiscal rectitude, the tweet went on to say, represents justice between older and younger generations and is a precondition of investments in society’s future, the Financial Times reported in a commentary.

In January-November 2019, UAH 7.878 billion was transferred to the accounts of insolvent banks, according to the Deposit Guarantee Fund of Ukraine, Ukrinform reported. “In January-November 2019, UAH 7,877.6 million was transferred to the accounts of banks being under liquidation. Of which the largest sum totaling UAH 6,832.0 million was received from the sale of assets of banks being under liquidation, UAH 928.2 million from repayment of loans, UAH 100.9 million from property rent, and UAH 16.6 million from redemption of securities,” reads the report.

Bad weather and belt-tightening hit the traditional start of Christmas discount sales on Thursday, dealing another blow to a high street retail industry blighted by years of shop closures and insolvencies, the Financial Times reported. Boxing Day has long marked the opening of the busy festive sales season, but its importance has waned as shoppers have moved online and retailers offer other promotions — such as November’s Black Friday — in the run-up to Christmas.

In Rome’s central shopping street, Via del Corso, Maria Lipari is looking for a scarf to give to her daughter for Christmas. Like many Italians, she prefers to pay for her festive gifts the old-fashioned way — with cash. But the Italian government hopes to persuade her to change. Italy has one of Europe’s lowest rates of usage of card payments, with 86 per cent of transactions paid for using notes and coins, according to central bank estimates, the Financial Times reported.

The Italian government is on the verge of an outright battle with the company that operates more than half of the country’s aging toll roads, Bloomberg News reported. After Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s administration provisionally approved rules on the revocation of highway concessions, operator Autostrade per L’Italia said Dec. 22 they appeared unconstitutional and contrary to European Union norms and would result in the “legal termination” of the concession agreement.

After a decade-long debt crisis that made Greece a bond-market pariah, the country now enjoys the luxury of having no financing needs for 2020. Yet the government’s 2020 budget shows it still plans to sell new debt, Bloomberg News reported. Despite a cash buffer of some 32 billion euros ($35.6 billion) left over from the country’s bailout program, Greece wants to maintain the good momentum of 2019 after yields hit record low levels in October.

A source close to Atlantia's motorway unit warned on Monday the company would go bankrupt if the government revoked its concession without compensation following the deadly collapse of a bridge last year, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The source said that the company, Autostrade per l'Italia (ASPI), would be unable to pay back 10.8 billion euros ($12 billion) in debt if it were stripped of its motorway concession without receiving any indemnity.