Italy

Troubled Italian airline Alitalia's debts have soared to some 2.3 billion euros, the company's special administrator said Sunday as a pilot and air crew strike caused a seventh day of cancelled flights, Agence France-Presse reported today. Augusto Fantozzi told RAI television he had "around two billion in ordinary debt for the supply of goods and services," before taking into account a 300-million-euro government loan. Alitalia's last publicly recorded debts going back to mid-2008 were 1.2 billion euros, although that figure did not include bills from suppliers.

The European Commission on Wednesday gave its green light to a plan by Italian investors to create a new Italian airline using the flight operations of the failed national carrier Alitalia, ANSA reported. Last August the Italian government changed Italy's bankruptcy laws to allow Alitalia's more profitable flight operations to be spun off into a separate company and sold while the carrier's remaining assets, referred to as a 'bad company', would be declared bankrupt and liquidated to pay for the airline's debts of over one billion euros.