Headlines

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nigerian lenders have picked Barclays to try to find new investors for debt-laden 9mobile, two banking sources said on Thursday. Barclays has started work on the mandate and is in the process of setting up a database for prospective investors to conduct due diligence, they said. Banking sources had previously said Citigroup and Standard Bank were in the running for the role, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. But the lenders decided against them due to their previous links with 9mobile, the sources said on Thursday.

When Eurobank Ergasias SA, Greece’s third-biggest lender, recently went after a “strategic defaulter,” angry protesters stormed the courtroom to block its foreclosure attempt. The defaulter, whose name the lender won’t disclose, had not serviced its loans for the last five years and owed the bank 4.85 million euros ($5.7 million), Bloomberg News reported. Over the same period, it had collected about 6 million euros in dividends from its 41 percent holding in a food company, showing, according to the bank, that it could honor its commitments.

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.

Cuba paid the second installment on a renegotiated $2.6 billion in debt to 14 wealthy creditor nations this week, diplomats from a number of the countries said, as some creditors prepare to swap debt for an equity stake in local development projects, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the payment showed the importance Cuba attaches to an agreement it reached in 2015 with the Paris Club group of major creditor nations.