Headlines

Lufthansa budget unit Eurowings has agreed a deal with the Verdi union that will allow it to hire new cabin crew at short notice from rivals such as bankrupt Air Berlin, Reuters reported. Eurowings launched a recruitment drive last month, seeking around 200 pilots and 400 cabin crew qualified to fly and crew A320 jets. Air Berlin also flies A320s and so Eurowings’ move is a chance for staff to get hired without waiting for talks on a carve-up of the carrier to finish.

Austrian airline Niki said on Wednesday it had paid all bills owed to a tour operator and it therefore expected to avert bankruptcy proceedings which have hit parent Air Berlin, Reuters reported. Law firm Kosch & Partner said earlier it had applied for insolvency proceedings against Niki on behalf of an Austrian tour operator which said it was owed money by Niki. The law firm declined to identify the tour operator. “We have reviewed the relevant post, and the claim has been settled,” Niki said in an email to Reuters.

Venezuela, one of the world’s riskiest countries for investors, is late on a debt payment, Bloomberg News reported. The intermediaries tasked with passing along interest payments for the cash-strapped nation haven’t received the funds for an $185 million coupon that was due Sept. 15, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Investors interviewed by Bloomberg say they haven’t been paid, and brokers say their clients are still waiting on the cash. The government has a 30-day grace period -- now 25 days -- to make good on the payment before triggering an event of default on the notes.

The Greek economy will remain under close supervision for years after the completion of the third bailout deal, the president of the Euro Working Group (EWG), Thomas Wieser told insider.gr in an interview published on Wednesday. Even though he is confident the cash-strapped country will be able to recover, Wieser says that a lot of work needs to be done first, starting with the timely completion of the third bailout review, the Financial Times reported. He also suggests that additional measures may be needed in 2019 and 2020 depending on the course of the budget next year.

Economic performance is improving in most of the world’s leading economies but is still short of a self-sustaining upswing, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said on Wednesday. In an update to its economic forecasts, the Paris-based international organisation representing advanced economies said that more private sector investment was needed for the expansion to endure, for wages to rise sustainably and for inequalities to be tackled, the Financial Times reported.

Airlines Condor and Eurowings plan to provide flights to the Caribbean from Duesseldorf, meeting demand from Germans seeking winter sunshine after cancellations by insolvent Air Berlin, Reuters reported. Air Berlin filed for bankruptcy protection in August after major shareholder Etihad pulled the plug on funding. It has been forced to scrap long-haul flights from its two bases of Duesseldorf and Berlin after a leasing company asked for its planes to be returned.

In a related story, tour operator TUI’s airline TUIfly is seeking to cut its costs by at least 30 million euros ($36 million) as it prepares to take back aircraft it has leased out to insolvent Air Berlin’s Austrian unit Niki, a German paper reported. Some 20 million euros of savings are to come from more flexible working hours for its nearly 500 pilots, daily Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung said late on Monday, citing company sources, Reuters reported.

Banks that provided a $4.75 billion loan to Turk Telekomunikasyon AS’s major shareholder hired Lazard Ltd. to advise them on the nation’s biggest ever default, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The creditors also hired Raiffeisen Investment AG to advise in negotiations over the loan taken out by Ojer Telekomunikasyon AS, or Otas, which owns 55 percent of Turk Telekom, Bloomberg News reported. Other parties to the talks are the Turkish Treasury, which also has a stake in the company, and Saudi Telecom Co., which indirectly owns shares, the people said.

After tackling billions of dollars in bad loans, Italian banks are moving on to a somewhat less risky but possibly trickier category of distressed debt as they seek to clean up their balance sheets, Bloomberg News reported. “Unlikely-to-pay loans are the next challenge for banks,” said Riccardo Serrini, chief executive officer of the asset manager Prelios Credit Servicing.

A London lawsuit over $700 million in Shariah-compliant bonds issued by Dana Gas PJSC will go ahead despite a last-minute United Arab Emirates court order that attempted to stop the company from taking part in the trial, Bloomberg News reported. Dana Gas stunned investors and the Islamic finance community when it announced in June that it had reviewed its own bonds and found they were not Shariah compliant. Bondholders, led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and BlackRock Inc., hired investment bankers and then lawyers when it became clear they were facing losses of 90 percent or more.