Spain

Bondholders who snubbed an aggressive tender offer from Santander last year have been rewarded, following a more generous and investor-friendly approach for the same bonds from the Spanish bank, Reuters reported. Santander on Wednesday launched an any-and-all buyback offer for a maximum of just over USD12bn in subordinated bonds as it seeks to boost its capital ratios. "Bondholders that balked at Santander's unmodified Dutch auction liability are now being offered a more straightforward offer with a higher premium," said a banker.

The number of registered unemployed in Spain rose beyond the 5m mark for the first time, but the relatively modest month-on-month increase raised fresh hopes that the country’s economic crisis may be starting to recede, the Financial Times reported. According to labour ministry data, almost 60,000 more people registered as unemployed in February than in the previous month, an increase of 1.2 per cent.

Pescanova SA, Europe’s second- biggest fish processor, plunged 60 percent after it started the initial phase of seeking creditors’ protection and delayed results pending asset sales and a debt renegotiation, Bloomberg reported. The shares tumbled to 6.96 euros in Madrid, or 60 percent lower than its previous close at 17.40 euros on Feb. 28, a day before it was suspended from trading by stock market regulator CNMV. The one-day decline was the most since at least 1994, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Spanish retail bank Caixabank SA said Monday it plans to cut 3,000 jobs as it adapts to a deep economic downturn and the recent takeovers of two smaller rivals, Dow Jones reported. The Barcelona bank said in a press release that it has started a negotiation period with labor unions on how to carry out the cuts, which it said are "necessary to adapt to the current environment and improve efficiency." Spain's banking sector has been shrinking for the past two years in the wake of the bust of a massive real estate bubble.

Reyal Urbis SA, a real-estate firm that became a stock-market darling before Spain's property boom went bust, said it would file for bankruptcy protection in what could become the second-largest default in Spanish corporate history, The Wall Street Journal reported. The firm, born of the merger of Inmobiliaria Urbis and Construcciones Reyal a year before the real estate crash of 2008, said in a statement Tuesday that it expects to reach an agreement with its creditors.

Small retail clients who invested in Spain's nationalised Bankia face substantial losses, with the bank's shares temporarily suspended on the Madrid stock exchange on Thursday morning amid rumours that existing stock would be declared almost worthless, The Guardian reported. The Frob, the country's bank restructuring fund, was forced to admit that the price it will set for swapping debt into shares at the bailed-out bank would be low – but denied reports that it would value shares at just 1 euro cent each.

Already living in Germany's shadow, the French economy is increasingly losing ground to southern Europe and Spain in particular, despite efforts by President Francois Hollande to claw back France's competitive edge, Reuters reported in an analysis. Though Hollande has reforms in the works to trim France's high labour costs and introduce more flexibility into the jobs market, the moves stop far short of what Spain has done.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said he would send parliament a plan to stimulate the economy and put young people back to work, his government's first big initiative to ease the pain of a long-running economic crisis that deepened in the final quarter of last year, The Wall Street Journal reported. Spain's fourth-quarter gross domestic product fell 0.7% from the third quarter and 1.8% from the year-earlier period, the National Statistics Institute said in a preliminary reading on Wednesday. Output for the whole of 2012 fell 1.4% from 2011, it said.

The few listed Spanish property firms to survive a brutal real estate crash are stepping up the fight with banks for more generous debt relief to outlast a crisis that could yet have years to run, Reuters reported. Companies must persuade banks that have already been forced by the government to write down property loans to cut their debt to reflect the plummeting value of the assets linked to it or simply to give them more time. But property prices have dropped by some 30 percent since a building boom collapsed in 2008, crippling Spanish banks that were heavily exposed to the sector.

Spain's unemployment rate reached a record 26% in the fourth quarter, the latest sign of deepening recession even as growing investor appetite for the country's government bonds brings relief from the country's debt crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. Data released Thursday by the National Statistics Institute showed the economy continued to shed public- and private-sector jobs in the final quarter of 2012 as the government worked to slash a big budget deficit.