Air France-KLM will strengthen its role in Italian airline Alitalia SpA, Italian transport minister Maurizio Lupi said on Monday, Reuters reported. "I expect that Air France will strongly reaffirm that Alitalia is a strategic asset for Air France, and therefore that there will be a strengthening of Air France's role," Lupi said at the margins of an industry conference in Milan.

The Netherlands’ newly inaugurated King Willem-Alexander has made his first annual appearance before parliament one to remember, with a speech effectively announcing the end of the generous Dutch welfare state, the Financial Times reported. The king delivered the speech as part of the annual celebration of “Prinsjesdag”, or “Prince’s Day”, when the Dutch live up to their money-conscious reputation by turning the government’s presentation of its budget for the forthcoming year into a whimsical political festival.

The Dutch government reached a deal on an austerity package for 2014 in a bid to meet European Union budget requirements despite fierce resistance to more belt-tightening at home and concerns that it could further harm the already struggling economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. The coalition government struck a deal on €6 billion ($8 billion) in tax increases and spending cuts, Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said Tuesday. "I'm satisfied that we have already reached a deal now," he said. Details will be given Sept.

Haarlem, officially the best shopping city in the Netherlands, looks like many picturesque Dutch towns: a medieval church surrounded by a hedonistic cornucopia of pedestrian shopping streets. Normally those streets are filled with confident window-shoppers, but these are not normal times, and Dutch consumers are feeling anything but confident, the Financial Times reported. Household spending has been falling for three straight years, and it dropped again 2.4 per cent year on year in the second quarter, dragging the entire economy down with it.

Magyar Telecom BV, the owner of Hungarian telecommunications company Invitel, asked its bondholders to vote on a debt-for-equity swap today as the company seeks to reduce borrowings and attract new investment, Bloomberg reported. Magyar Telecom, controlled by Mid Europa Partners LLP, set an Aug. 15 deadline for responses to its restructuring proposal and has support from holders of as much as 65 percent of its notes, it said in an Aug. 13 statement. It’s preparing a scheme of arrangement, a U.K.

A modest 10-floor office block on the eastern edge of Amsterdam houses the headquarters of Energyco, Agro Trade International, Banzai Venture Investments and about 2000 other companies. Fully 1942 of those companies list their address as Postbox 990, which one might think would be stuffed with letters. But just one company is responsible for all of them – Intertrust, a trust firm that creates and manages subsidiaries for multinationals, even if some of them have little or no real business activities in the Netherlands.

The Dutch government is taking a more relaxed approach toward austerity and delaying changes in jobless benefits in a bid to restore consumer confidence, revive the economy and make it easier to meet European Union budget targets next year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The move is the latest sign that the Netherlands, one of the more fiscally hawkish members in the euro zone and a steadfast ally of Germany, is softening its hard-line stance as it grapples with its own economic woes.

More Dutch companies declared bankruptcy in February than at any time since records began in 1981, the Associated Press reported. The country's Central Bureau for Statistics also says Monday that on a three-month average, bankruptcies are at their highest level on record: around 680 per month, not counting one-person businesses. The Dutch economy is struggling as the government cuts spending and increases taxes to meet European budget rules that require countries to get their budget deficits down to 3 percent of their annual gross domestic product.

At the Netherlands’ highest civil court, lawyers clamoured to block the government’s move to wipe out stakes of shareholders and bondholders when it nationalised lender SNS Reaal earlier this month, the Financial Times reported. Investors at the hearing denounced Jeroen Dijsselbloem, finance minister, for exceeding his authority; one went so far as to accuse him of fraud.

Announcing a €3.7bn bailout of mortgage lender SNS Reaal, Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said in a statement he had “looked at every alternative involving private parties”, but found none that could guarantee the stability of the Dutch banking system, the Financial Times reported. An earlier plan to have ING and ABN Amro, two other bailed-out institutions, rescue SNS had been blocked by the European Commission on state-aid grounds. Under the terms of SNS’s rescue, shareholders and subordinated debt holders will see their stakes wiped out.