Italy

Shares in Monte dei Paschi di Siena rose more than 5 per cent after the boutique fund Quaestio bought a chunk of bad loans from the bank for around €800m. Milan-based Quaestio said it had bought around 95 per cent of a tranche of €25bn non-performing loans from Monte Paschi, the Financial Times reported. The Tuscan bank is 68 per cent owned by the Italian Treasury, after a government-backed rescue last year.

One of the world's most famous hat makers, Borsalino, whose stylish fedoras and straw panamas are popular with movie stars and celebrities, faces liquidation after a rescue plan was rejected by an Italian court on Monday, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. A judge in the northern town of Alessandria, where the luxury hat maker was founded 160 years ago, refused a request for court protection from creditors, who are owed some 18 million euros ($21 million), a local trade union leader told Reuters. "It's dramatic if a solution is not found.

A manager at the center of investigations into an accounting scandal at British Telecom’s Italian business has been awarded almost 1.8 million euros ($2.1 million) in damages for wrongful dismissal, three legal sources said on Wednesday. Gianluca Cimini was fired for disciplinary reasons last year, months before the phone company filed a criminal complaint accusing him of grave violations of corporate governance, Reuters reported. The accusations arose from its investigation of alleged accounting fraud that cost the firm 530 million pounds ($690 million).

The answer to cleaning up bad loans still weighing down Italian banks may lie in a controversial proposal that would allow lenders to sell their debt at deep discounts without being forced to hold more capital, Bloomberg News reported. European Parliament lawmaker Peter Simon, who’s leading the assembly’s work on updating prudential rules for the region’s banks, wants to make it easier to sell debt cheaply without having to adjust a calculation known as loss given default, which typically hurts banks’ capital ratios.

A complex scheme Italy conceived to help the country's banks offload their bad loans seems ready at last to deliver on its potential, as the lenders fight their way through a mass of practical problems, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The "GACS" state guarantee scheme, aimed at easing a major concern hanging over the Italian economy, has had a long gestation. European authorities approved the plan almost two years ago, and one senior banker has compared the drawn-out task of preparing debt sales under its rules with childbirth.

Banca Carige SpA reached agreement with a group of banks to underwrite a share sale of about 500 million euros ($590 million) after key investors pledged their support, allowing the lender to proceed with its restructuring plan, Bloomberg News reported. Malacalza Investimenti, Carige’s main investor, agreed to buy 17.6 percent of the stock, while the second-biggest shareholder Gabriele Volpi agreed to oversubscribe to the offer, increasing his stake to 9.9 percent from 6 percent, the Genoa-based lender said in a statement early Saturday.

Growth in Italy’s services sector cooled to a one-year low in October as domestic demand struggled, a survey published on Monday showed. The Italian service sector still expanded in October according to the IHS Markit Italy services purchasing managers’ index — the third month in a row that activity has slowed, the Financial Times reported. But the index dropped to a one-year low of 52.1, down from September’s 53.2 and below analysts’ expectations in a Reuters poll of a 53.0 reading.

Monte dei Paschi di Siena shares soared on their market return after a 10-month hiatus, but remained well below the price Italy paid to bail out its fourth-largest bank, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The world's oldest bank's shares last traded in Milan in December 2016 when Monte dei Paschi had to turn to Rome for help after failing to find buyers for a 5 billion euro (£4.4 billion) share issue needed to keep it afloat.

Monte dei Paschi di Siena shares will resume trading on Wednesday 10 months after they were suspended when Italy's fourth-largest bank failed to raise capital to bolster its finances, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. Monte dei Paschi said on Tuesday that Italy's market watchdog had approved a prospectus for its re-listing. The bank's stock is expected to trade below the 6.49 euro price paid by the state in August when it injected 3.85 billion euros into Monte dei Paschi, implying a large paper loss for the country's taxpayers.

Italy on Friday extended a bridge loan for airline Alitalia, which is in special administration as state commissioners seek to sell, overhaul or liquidate the carrier, Reuters reported. Italy’s cabinet said in a statement it had passed an emergency decree to add a further 300 million euros ($354.36 million) to the loan of 600 million euros it made to the ailing company in May. It also extended the deadline for the repayment of the loan, which was due in November this year, to Sept. 30, 2018.