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Hundreds of international and domestic flights in Italy were cancelled Friday as air transport workers held a nationwide strike to protest feared firings and salary cuts at troubled national carrier Alitalia, the Associated Press reported. Attempts to find a buyer for the airline, run by state-appointed administrators since it declared bankruptcy in 2017, fell apart last month. Last week, the Italian government agreed to grant Alitalia a new 400 million euros ($445 million) to keep it afloat until a buyer can be found.
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A jury in Montreal found a former SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. executive guilty of corruption-related charges in a case that examined the Montreal firm’s past activities in Libya, which were at the center of a political firestorm earlier this year, the New York Times reported. The Montreal-based engineering and construction firm now awaits its own trial on fraud and corruption charges.
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Nynas AB, owned by Venezuela’s state-run PDVSA and Finland’s Neste Oil, on Friday filed for company reorganization at a Swedish court as the refiner failed to extend loans as it dealt with the fallout of U.S. sanctions, Reuters reported. Swedish Nynas’ business has suffered as the United States in October introduced changes to a license that had allowed it to import Venezuelan oil despite sanctions imposed on its owner PDVSA.
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Australia’s mid-year budget update showed economic reality is starting to bear down on the government’s finances, Bloomberg News reported. Treasury lowered its forecast surplus for the 12 months through June 2020 to A$5 billion ($3.4 billion) from April’s budget estimate of A$7.1 billion as it scaled back estimated tax revenues, according to the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook released in Canberra on Monday. It also predicted narrower surpluses for the following three fiscal years.
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Argentina, the world’s biggest seller of processed soybean meal and oil, raised export taxes on Saturday as the government seeks to fund spending under new President Alberto Fernandez, Bloomberg News reported. After the peso’s 37 percent slump this year, his administration is replacing a levy of 4 pesos per dollar for many exports with a fixed charge of 9 percent, according to a decree in the official gazette.
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The favored funding source of China’s real-estate developers is under scrutiny in one of the country’s largest urban areas, posing a threat to a sector that has stretched creative financing to its limits, the Wall Street Journal reported. On Friday, the city of Xi’an in central China opened a consultation process on instituting an escrow system that would ensure developers hold on to funds worth 1.2 times the cost of building a new property when booking a presale.
China has made developing its own chip industry a matter of patriotic pride. It helps that “China chip” and “China heart” sound the same in the local language. The strain of this 1.7 trillion yuan ($243 billion) endeavor may be too much for the debt-clogged arteries of its municipal governments, though, according to a Bloomberg News commentary. Over the past decade, Beijing hasn’t hesitated to deploy its fiscal might in pursuit of economic and social objectives.
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Boris Johnson’s general election victory, and the likely departure of Britain from the European Union next month, will bring relief to most European governments: Now they can focus on other pressing issues facing the bloc, the Wall Street Journal reported. Yet Brexit was a rare point of unity for the remaining 27 members and life beyond it could expose divisions among them. It isn’t clear, for example, how cohesive those left in the bloc can be as they confront issues after Britain’s departure—including negotiating new trade relations with the U.K.
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Global automakers may face another potentially huge air-bag recall as the U.S. transport regulator evaluates the long-term safety of inflators made by bankrupt supplier Takata Corp., Bloomberg News reported. The manufacturer, now owned by China’s Ningbo Joyson Electronic Corp., faces a Dec. 31 deadline to show the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that as many as 100 million inflators containing a chemical drying agent will be safe long-term.
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A decisive victory for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in the British election sent investors scrambling to buy U.K. stocks and pushed the pound to its highest level against the dollar since May 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported. The FTSE 100 index, which tracks the U.K.’s largest companies, rose 1.9 percent, marking its biggest gain since February. The rally was led by gains in stocks such as house builder Taylor Wimpey PLC and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC.