France

The European Union is preparing to reject France’s 2015 budget, according to European officials, setting up a clash that would be the biggest test yet of new powers for Brussels that were designed to prevent a repeat of the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said last month that his country would run a budget deficit of 4.3% of gross domestic product next year—far from the 3% deficit it had previously pledged.

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.

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.

More than a week into the strike by French pilots against Air France-KLM, the two sides are stuck in a holding pattern. The only certainty seems to be that the dispute is doing severe financial damage to the airline, the International New York Times reported. With the cost of the pilots’ walkout now approaching 20 million euros, or $26 million, per day, investors and politicians can only wonder whether the opposing parties’ shared commitment to the airline’s survival will prove strong enough to avert disaster.

Air France pilots rejected a proposal from management on Monday and vowed to extend indefinitely a strike that has grounded tens of thousands of passengers over the last week and threatens to wipe out tens of millions of dollars in revenue, the International New York Times reported.

France announced on Wednesday it was breaking the latest in a long line of promises to European Union partners to cut its public deficit, conceding it now would take until 2017 to bring its finances in line with EU rules, Reuters reported. The statement by Finance Minister Michel Sapin follows weeks of hints by Paris that weakness in the euro zone's second-largest economy would prevent it bringing the deficit below the EU ceiling of 3 percent of output next year as promised.

French wind farm operator Theolia has agreed with its main creditor to restructure its convertible bonds, which it would be unable to cover in full at the next repayment date, it said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Theolia said that investment group Boussard & Gavaudan, which holds 33.35 percent of its of Oceanes 2007 convertible bond, had agreed to extend the conversion schedule in exchange for better conversion terms. In April, Theolia had said that if bondholders were to ask for early repayment by Jan.

The French economy will keep expanding at a slow pace in the third quarter of the year, the Bank of France said today, while other statistics showed industrial production rising more than expected in June, but no improvement in public finances, the Wall Street Journal reported today. France's economy will grow 0.2 percent in the third quarter from the second, the Bank of France said in its monthly business climate survey. That follows the same quarterly expansion in the second quarter, according to the central bank's previous survey.

Zodiac Pool Solutions SAS, the Paris-based swimming pool and spa manufacturer, filed Thursday for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. as part of its debt-restructuring effort now under way in the U.K., The Wall Street Journal reported. Formerly known as Zodiac Marine & Pool, Zodiac Pool filed for protection under Chapter 15—the section of the Bankruptcy Code that deals with international insolvencies—in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.

Workers at France-Corsica ferry operator SNCM must end their strike and let the troubled company undergo a restructuring to secure its future, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Loss-making SNCM, whose unions have been on strike since June 24, risks bankruptcy and needs to be placed under court protection, Valls told TV station TF1 in an interview. "This situation cannot go on and there needs to be a court-ordered restructuring, because this company is sinking, and in fact the days of strike that accumulate are only putting it more into trouble," Valls said.