German airline Air Berlin is demanding damages from its part-owner Etihad Airways for letting it become insolvent and it hopes for payment of at least 10 million euros ($11.8 million), Air Berlin’s administrator told a German newspaper. “We are in negotiations with Etihad and hope to reach a general settlement soon. We are hoping for a two-digit million euro sum,” daily Rheinische Post on Saturday quoted administrator Frank Kebekus as saying.

In a related story, Reuters reported that an Air Berlin airliner was grounded at Iceland’s Keflavik airport late on Thursday because the insolvent German carrier had not paid its airport charges, Keflavik operator Isavia said in a statement. It said the unpaid charges had been incurred before Air Berlin, which has struggled to turn a profit over the last decade, filed for insolvency on Aug. 15. According to German magazine Stern, the Airbus A320 landed at Keflavik at 10:35 p.m. local time on Thursday and was due to depart for Duesseldorf just after midnight.

European banking union has been an important step forward in the implementation of a fully functioning economic and monetary union. But it remains incomplete, the Financial Times reported. The first two legs — the Single Supervisory Mechanism and the Single Resolution Fund — have been realised, but one is still missing: the European Deposit Insurance Scheme. Several proposals for the third leg have been put forward, but little progress has been made. A widespread view is that no advance can be made on the EDIS until the issues related to banks’ legacy assets are addressed.

Spanish bonds were shaken and the country’s stocks erased two days of gains as Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government deployed its ultimate constitutional weapon in a bid to bring Catalonia’s bid for independence to an end, Bloomberg News reported. Spain’s 10-year bond yield climbed from a one-month low after the country said it will move forward with the process of suspending the powers of the Catalan government following Regional President Carles Puigdemont’s refusal to drop his claim to independence.

A consortium of family-owned Zeitfracht and maintenance group Nayak is close to striking a deal to buy Air Berlin’s cargo marketing platform and its maintenance business, several people familiar with the matter told Reuters. “They are on the home stretch,” one of the sources said. A spokesman for Zeitfracht said that talks were promising and had reached an advanced stage, Reuters reported. Air Berlin declined to comment. Air Berlin, which has struggled to turn a profit over the last decade, filed for insolvency on Aug. 15.

When French president Emmanuel Macron urged EU leaders to be “bold” as he laid out a vision for the next phase of closer European integration, he provoked a wave of optimism in many capitals on the continent enfeebled by the eurozone’s debt crisis and populist campaigns against the bloc’s influence, the Financial Times reported. Central to Mr Macron’s vision is an overhaul of the eurozone by buttressing it with a common budget, reform of its bailout fund and a Brussels-based finance minister.

Greece’s Eurobank is tapping the bond market for the first time in more than three years, becoming the country’s latest lender to sell a type of debt that may ultimately be bought by the European Central Bank, the Financial Times reported. The bank has hired a consortium of investment banks to sell a three-year covered bond as early as next week, as the broader Greek financial sector returns to international markets following a multiyear hiatus.

Vitol Group’s negotiations to buy Noble Group Ltd.’s oil trading unit are “very complicated” and may not end in a deal, the chief executive officer of Vitol said, adding to pressure on his Hong Kong-based rival, Bloomberg News reported. The sale of the oil business is crucial to the survival of Noble Group, once Asia’s largest commodity trader. It is rushing to sell the unit in order to pay back about $1 billion of debt under its secured credit facilities, of which the largest matures in mid-January.

While Brexit consumes the entirety of the UK political debate and then some, in the rest of the EU it is a relatively minor issue among a large portfolio of other policy questions. It is a sign of the recovered European confidence that the EU27 leaders are lifting their eyes to the horizon; as our Brussels Briefing reports ahead of this week’s European Council meeting, they are determined to stake out more long-term policy paths rather than be caught out by events or stuck in petty indecision, the Financial Times reported.

Mario Draghi has said there is a “window of opportunity” to implement structural reforms, tackle “vested interests” and give “proper support” to “those who have lost out” while monetary policy remains loose, the Financial Times reported. The European Central Bank president disputed the view that stimulative monetary policy discourages employment and wider market reform by taking pressure off governments to act during periods of crisis.