Spain

Spanish banks may have to swallow more losses to shake off the legacy of a property crash, real estate experts warn, as they struggle to sell plots of land that have ended up on their books and which are now worth less than many have accounted for, Reuters reported. Lenders were forced by the government to take billions of euros in provisions against losses last year after property values collapsed in 2008, with the steepest writedowns destined to cover land they were saddled with as developers went bust.

Spain’s cuts to renewable energy subsidies will leave many project developers facing bankruptcy, four industry lobby groups said, Bloomberg News reported. Spanish Industry Minister Jose Manuel Soria’s decision to curtail profits for power generators by 2.7 billion euros ($4.1 billion) this year “will lead many installations to bankruptcy because they won’t be able to repay the credit that financed them,” the Spanish Photovoltaic Union (UNEF) said yesterday.

Indebted Spanish media company Promotora de Informaciones SA has weighed filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S., according to several people familiar with the matter, the latest indication of the troubled financial state of Spain's largest media company, The Wall Street Journal reported. The possible move by Prisa, as the company is known, comes as it seeks to refinance about $3 billion of debt, the people said. The discussions of different restructuring options are still fluid and nothing has yet been decided, they added.

The debts of Spanish fishing firm Pescanova were more than double what it stated when it entered insolvency proceedings in April, the company said on Wednesday citing a KPMG audit, making it one of Spain's biggest ever bankruptcies, Reuters reported. Pescanova's debt was 3.3 billion euros ($4.2 billion) at the end of December, the company said. This compares with the 1.5 billion euro debt mentioned in the company's insolvency filing. The former management of Pescanova acted to conceal the company's true debt position for many years, the audit said.

A Spanish government investigation into the public offering of a struggling bank that saddled investors with huge losses questions the independence of the Spanish unit of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. and says that auditing work it did may have been faulty. The findings, part of a preliminary report by the Spanish Accounting and Audit Institute on the auditing of Spanish lender Bankia SA ahead of its ill-fated €3 billion ($3.92 billion) IPO two summers ago, could result in sanctions and tens of millions of euros in fines for Deloitte, the report says.

Spain's bank-bailout fund will try in the coming months to sell two loss-making lenders the government nationalized last year, a senior official at the fund said Monday, four months after a previous attempt to sell one of them failed, The Wall Street Journal reported. He said the bailout fund, known by its Spanish acronym FROB, will soon hire two investment banks to analyze the balance sheets of NCG Banco SA and Catalunya Banc SA and open discussions with would-be buyers.

Spain's government raised its long-term economic growth projections slightly and said it would boost taxes and public spending next year, following a relaxation of deficit targets by the European Union, but signaled that recovery from the country's recession would be slow, The Wall Street Journal reported. Spanish officials said Friday they would raise the ceiling for 2014 public spending by 2.7%, to €133 billion euros ($173.41 billion).

The shareholders of Spanish plastics bottle maker La Seda de Barcelona on Wednesday rejected a debt refinancing plan that would have allowed the company to withdraw from insolvency proceedings, its largest shareholder said, Reuters reported. The Catalonia-based company, which makes bottles in Europe, Turkey and North Africa, has been in talks with creditors for months since high material costs and excess supply of the PET plastic containers it makes put pressure on its business.

Spanish plastics bottle maker La Seda de Barcelona will ask shareholders to approve its debt refinancing plan and allow it to withdraw from insolvency proceedings on Wednesday, a person close to the company with knowledge of the plan told Reuters. La Seda said in a stock market notice on Tuesday that it had reached a preliminary deal to refinance 75 percent of its syndicated debt with creditors, after saying last week it would file for insolvency.

Alpine Bau, the insolvent Austrian arm of Spanish construction group FCC, faces being broken up after late-night talks to save the company in its current form failed, putting up to 5,000 jobs at risk, Reuters reported. The head of Alpine Bau's works council, Hermann Haneder, said on Monday a consortium of rival builders was now looking at taking over parts of the company, either at the level of provincial divisions or individual projects. "The question is, will the workers be kept on when the projects are finished?" said Haneder, who took part in the last-ditch talks.