Spanish banking giant Santander today confirmed its bid for more than 300 branches that are being sold off by part-nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland in Britain, Finfacts reported. The owner of Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley is the sole bidder for the 318 branches which NatWest owner RBS is disposing on the instructions of the European Commission. The business being sold has about three million customers - - - two-thirds of which are small businesses - - and consists of RBS branches in England and Wales as well as its NatWest uniits in Scotland.

Spanish banks are borrowing record amounts from the European Central Bank as the country’s financial institutions struggle to gain funding from the international capital markets, the Financial Times reported. Spanish banks borrowed €85.6bn ($105.7bn) from the ECB last month. This was double the amount lent to them before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and 16.5 per cent of net eurozone loans offered by the central bank.

Spanish officials acknowledged that the country's banks and companies are having difficulty finding credit, underscoring the pressure Madrid faces to pursue deep structural changes to win back investor confidence, The Wall Street Journal reported. Investors are particularly concerned that Spain would be unable to supply its banks with more capital, if needed, without emergency aid from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Spain has been scrambling in recent weeks to convince markets that it can repair both its ballooning deficit and its troubled banking sector.

Spain has refuted claims that it is to seek aid from the European Union, The Irish Times reported. Spain's economy ministry said Friday that it has not made a request for economic aid from the European Union, after a report in the FT Deutschland that the EU was preparing an aid package in case Madrid asked for it. The newspaper said that the EU was preparing for an aid application in the months ahead for access to the fund set up to lend to euro zone countries that run into Greek-style payments problems.

Marathon negotiations to overhaul Spain's rigid labor market collapsed on Thursday, raising the prospect of a tug-of-war between the government and trade unions in the troubled euro zone state, Reuters reported. The head of the World Bank meanwhile cast doubt on Europe's ability to surmount a sovereign debt crisis without restructuring liabilities of heavily indebted countries such as Greece -- a step euro zone leaders are refusing to contemplate.

Spain's public-sector workers went on strike Tuesday in what could be a run-up to a full general strike in response to recent spending cuts the government has announced to reduce Spain's budget deficit, The Wall Street Journal reported. The strike is a challenge against austerity measures worth a total of €15 billion ($17.88 billion) this year and next, including a 5% cut in public-sector wages this year and a freeze in pensions next year.

CajaSur, a 146-year-old regional savings bank founded and controlled by the Catholic Church—but run in partnership with the area's regional and local governments, local unions and the bank's clientele—was among a group of small savings banks, known as cajas, that fueled Spain's heady housing boom over the last decade with liberal lending practices to developers and homeowners alike. Today, however, that boom has gone bust amid a tidal wave of bad loans in a country plagued by rapidly growing government debt and high unemployment.

Caught between a populace resistant to more austerity measures and investors demanding budget cuts and more flexible labor markets, the Spanish government is finding it increasingly difficult to keep a grip on power, The New York Times reported. Last week, the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero narrowly won approval for an extra 15 billion euros, or $18.4 billion, in spending cuts — in an effort to bring the budget deficit down to 6 percent of the national economic output by 2011, from 11 percent last year. With labor unions and business leaders at loggerheads, Mr.

Spanish football teams are shooting for a new goal: To break even. In an effort to tackle reckless spending and rising debts among the 20 La Liga clubs, the country's top teams will be subjected to financial regulation by a new independent body established by the Spanish government to ensure that teams are living within their means, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Spanish central bank officials sought Monday to reassure nervous depositors after taking over ailing Church-controlled savings bank CajaSur over the weekend and firing its senior management, The Wall Street Journal reported. For the Bank of Spain, the cleanup of a mutual savings bank that holds just 0.6% of the country's banking assets shouldn't prove difficult. But the seizure of CajaSur comes as authorities grapple with a sector reeling from the collapse of the housing market at the same time that the government is hard-pressed to fix its own finances.