Should a country embrace buyout groups with a growing appetite for its assets or repel them as rapacious capitalism on fears of job cuts and short financial gains? That’s the question facing Spain — which for the greater part of the past decade has suffered a steep economic crisis — as it finds itself luring a growing number of buyout funds looking to snap up assets, according to DD’s Javier Espinoza, the Financial Times reported.
Spain
Banco Santander said it will no longer hire Andrea Orcel, the outgoing boss of UBS’s investment bank, as its chief executive in a big U-turn just four months after Spain’s largest lender announced his appointment. Santander said the reversal was triggered by the amount that the bank would have had to pay Mr Orcel to compensate him for deferred stock awards that he earned during his seven-year career at UBS, the Financial Times reported.
The chairwoman and chief executive have resigned, the head of finance has been fired, while the company’s dividend has been slashed and its debt downgraded to junk, the Financial Times reported. It has been a grim few months for Dia Group, the Spanish supermarket chain. The bad news has crushed the group’s shares, which have this year plummeted more than 80 per cent to under €0.70, and pushed down the company’s long-term debt to around half its face value.
Aryzta, the troubled Irish-Swiss baked goods group, has been urged to halve the scale of a planned €800 million rights issue designed to pay down debt and fund the group through a major restructuring of its operations, The Irish Times reported. Cobas Asset Management, the Spanish group that is Aryzta’s largest single shareholder, said on Monday that it is requesting an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders to reduce the money being raised to €400 million. Cobas owns almost 15 per cent of Aryzta’s voting stock.