By Tania Suárez, in Madrid | On Tuesday afternoon, July 31, the Council for Fiscal and Financial Policy (CPFF by its Spanish initials) will meet the central government in order to establish the deficit target and debt levels of each region in Spain for 2013. It is expected that the regions will adapt themselves to the general targets, which marked a mutual deficit of 0.7% for 2013, 0.1% for 2014…
By Íñigo Villegui | Capitalmadrid.com | Something is happening in the euro zone. The possibility of a purchase of bonds by the European Central Bank or by a bailout fund, which would favour the tightening of risk premiums and facilitate access to markets for public and private sectors, is getting closer. Or, at least, that’s what investors assume. They have gone from considering that Spanish finances were doomed to dismiss…
MADRID | Inditex announced this week it signed a letter of intent for the acquisition of 300,000 square metres in Cabanillas, Guadalajara (Spain) in order to expand its logistics capacity. The project is set within the plans of the group’s investment in its facilities in Spain detailed by the chairman Pablo Isla during the general meeting of shareholders held on July 17. Initially, a 70,000 square metre platform for logistics activities is…
By Luis A. Torralba, in Valencia | Electricity producers in Spain have managed to weather the crisis under the umbrella of extraordinary income from non-recurring profits. But the markets, in spite of historically high dividends, are letting the uncertainty over the pending energy sector reform drag stocks down with a vengeance. Some declarations bring little help. The minister for Energy and Tourism José Manuel Soria recently gave away a warning:…
The European Commission announced Friday it had temporarily approved a bridge recapitalisation via the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund (HFSF) for Alpha Bank, EFG Eurobank, Piraeus Bank and National Bank of Greece. The injection of public capital will be provided under EU State aid rules to ensure the entities’ financial stability. But, at the same time, the Commission said it had also opened four in-depth investigations to examine whether the measure…
MADRID | Analysts at BNP Paribas’s broker Cortal Consors in Spain said in an investor note that their scenarios for the situation of the unemployment levels would not register any improvement until the second half of next year. Occupation is still under a heavy destruction trend in Spain, with a -4.1 percent during the second quarter of 2012. Unfortunately, data released today by the Spanish institute of statistics backed pessimistic…
BARCELONA | CaixaBank reported Friday a poor attributed January to March net income of €166 million as a result of provisions enforced by the Spanish government, set to clean up the balance sheets of the country’s banking sector. For the Catalan entity, the figure means an 80.1-percent cut down comparing to the first quarter of 2011 and bears the scars of large write-downs of €3.735 billion. CaixaB ank said that, as…
BEIJING | China is thirsty of energy. It’s the world’s biggest consumer of energy and the second consumer of oil. The world’s biggest country needs energy more than anything in order to keep the engine of growth working at high speed. Furthermore, development and urbanisation plans might put their dependency on foreign resources to the brink due to an increasing need of energy to power its vast urban areas. So,…
Moody’s investors service said Thursday it had changed to negative the outlooks of 17 German banking groups and several subsidiaries. The decision affected their long-term debt and deposit ratings or their long-term guaranteed debt obligations, whose ratings incorporate support from the German government or several German federal states or municipalities. Moody’s explained the update of outlooks was the consequence of German sovereign and sub-sovereign ratings having been graded to negative from…
MADRID | Banco Santander announced Thursday a net attributable profit of €1.704 billion in the first half of the year. The figure brings a cut down of about 51% compared with the same period in 2011. The Spanish bank pointed out that the decline is a result of setting aside €1.304 billion for provisions for real estate exposure in Spain of the second quarter ordinary profit of €1.404 billion. As a…