After a two-week pilots' strike that inconvenienced nearly a million passengers and caused Air France to lose an estimated 280 million euros, the airline was slowly returning to the skies on Monday, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. It was unclear what the pilots had achieved from the strike, other than to delay severely the return to profitability for the French-Dutch parent company, Air France-KLM, and to curb the company’s ambitions for growth in Europe’s fiercely competitive regional market.

FlyRomania (X5, Bucharest Otopeni) has filed for insolvency with a Bucharest court. A filing seen by ch-aviation has now called for all creditors to lodge claims with the airline's interim trustee, Dinu Urse Associates, with the deadline for submissions set for October 30. Doubts about the Ten Airways (X5, Bucharest Baneasa) subsidiary's long-term viability first surfaced in June when poor load-factors forced it to dramatically scale down its flights, just one month after it launched operations.

The Lloyds Banking Group said today that it had terminated the contracts of eight individuals and clawed back about £3 million in bonuses after its settlement of inquiries into the manipulation of global benchmark interest rates, the Irish Times reported. In July, Lloyds agreed to pay more than $380 million to British and US authorities to resolve investigations into the manipulation of rates, including one used to determine fees paid by Lloyds related to a £17 billion taxpayer-backed bailout during the financial crisis.

A deemster has criticised the island’s ‘archaic and confusing’ insolvency laws, Isle of Man Today reported. Deemster Alan Gough made the comments as he delivered judgment in the case of a company owned by a Nigerian oil tycoon whose high profile divorce case made headlines worldwide.

China's Fosun International Ltd has upped its bid for Portugal's Espirito Santo Saude (ESS) to 4.82 euros a share or 460.5 million euros ($584 million) in total, stepping up the battle over the hospital business of the indebted Espirito Santo family, Reuters reported. Portugal's CMVM market regulator said late on Friday it registered the all-cash offer by conglomerate Fosun's Portuguese insurance unit Fidelidade, while also extending by a week to Oct. 10 a rival offer by Mexico's Grupo Angeles, the first to bid for ESS. Angeles initially offered 4.3 euros a share for the company on Aug.

Weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin annexed Crimea in March, an obscure regulatory board in Moscow known as the Market Council convened inside an office tower not far from the Kremlin to discuss the country’s wholesale electricity market. It is a colossal business, worth 2 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product, and a rich source of fees for the bank that had long held the exclusive right to service it.

Despite bowing to an important union demand, Air France-KLM remained crippled on Thursday by an 11-day-old pilots’ strike, the International New York Times reported.

The European Union's banking watchdog is investigating a possible breach of the bloc's deposit-guarantee law at Bulgaria's Corporate Commercial Bank, three months after the lender suspended client payments and the central bank put it under special supervision following a bank run, The Wall Street Journal reported.

New amendments to the Latvian insolvency legislation allowing struggling mortgage holders to mail their home keys to their lenders to get rid of their loan obligations have seriously upset banks, Latvia's Dienas Bizness daily reported on Thursday. The Association of Latvian Commercial Banks is determined to appeal to Latvian President Andris Berzins not to promulgate the amendments and to send them back to the parliament for revision, the banking association's spokeswoman Baiba Melnace told BNS.

The British government announced on Thursday it would increase its oversight of a broad array of financial benchmarks in the foreign exchange, fixed income and commodity markets, including making it a criminal offense for traders to manipulate them, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported.