Italy is willing to support the creation of a “New Alitalia” in the latest attempt to help revive the struggling carrier, the prime minister’s office said in a statement on Wednesday. Alitalia was put under special administration in 2017 after workers rejected its latest rescue plan, leaving the government once again seeking a buyer to save the carrier, Reuters reported. It will be the airline’s third rescue in a decade.
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Matteo Salvini has raised the possibility of wresting control of Italy’s sizeable gold reserves away from the country’s central bank in the latest in a series of threats to the independence of the Bank of Italy by Rome’s populist coalition, the Financial Times reported. “The gold is the property of the Italian people, not of anyone else,” Mr Salvini, deputy prime minister and leader of the League party, said in comments to reporters on Monday.
Italy is just the latest major borrower to benefit from searing global demand for sovereign bonds, with investors casting aside concerns about the country’s relapse into recession to help the government lock in funding over the next 30 years, Bloomberg News reported. Italy’s carpe diem sale is allowing it to raise 8 billion euros ($9.1 billion) as investors scramble to lend to some of the world’s biggest borrowers, including Japan, the U.S. and Greece.
Italy’s Treasury is not planning to seek EU approval to extend a state guarantee scheme Rome devised to help banks offload bad loans in order to include so-called “unlikely-to-pay” (UTP) loans, a government source said, Reuters reported. Italy introduced the ‘GACS’ scheme to ease bad loan sales. Under the measure, which expires in early March after being renewed twice, banks can buy a guarantee from the state to wrap the least risky tranche in a bad loan securitisation sale.
It’s a messy end to the week for Italian assets. The country’s bonds and stocks are being heavily sold, besieged by further signs of a slowing economy and deepening concern about the heavily indebted eurozone fiscal position, the Financial Times reported. Bleak data showed business conditions worsened at a faster pace than forecast in January, with new order data falling more sharply, adding to a decline in production. The numbers came a day after confirmation of the return to recession for Italy’s economy at the end of 2018.
The Italian economy fell into a technical recession in the last half of 2018 after a sharp increase in government borrowing costs and political uncertainty driven by Rome’s populist government’s stand-off with Brussels over its budget plans, the Financial Times reported. Official preliminary data showed that Italian gross domestic product contracted by 0.2 per cent in the last three months of 2018, following an 0.1 per cent drop in the third quarter. The contraction was worse than average forecasts of economists of a 0.1 per cent drop in GDP in the fourth quarter.
A consortium building Turkey’s Gebze-Orhangazi-Izmir motorway has started seeking international advisers to value the project ahead of a possible stake sale, Otoyol Investment company said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. In a first stage, the consortium will determine the value of the project and potential buyers, the consortium, which includes Italian construction group Astaldi, said in a statement. “It is a lengthy process to sell a stake in a project of this scale,” the consortium said, adding it would be up to the partners to decide whether to dispose of their share.
German airlines group Lufthansa has held talks to take a majority stake in ailing Italian carrier Alitalia and would be interested in a full takeover in the long run, Lufthansa board member Harry Hohmeister said on Monday, Reuters reported. Alitalia, which was put under special administration in 2017, would remain operationally independent within the Lufthansa group, with its own brand, he said. Lufthansa has been a key player in hectic M&A activity in the industry, snapping up Brussels Airlines and parts of insolvent Air Berlin in 2017 to expand in the budget market.
Intesa Sanpaolo SpA is preparing a sale of non-performing loans from a 15.6 billion-euro ($17.8 billion) pool of debt on its books categorized as “unlikely-to-pay,” according to four people familiar with the discussions, Bloomberg News reported. The loans are backed by real-estate and corporate assets, said the people, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The Italian lender has yet to decide how much of the debt it will sell and is still consulting investors to gauge demand, the people said.