DavidJackson.info

It appears Spanair, Spain’s largest private airline, has gone bust after a Qatar investment fund pulled out of an investment talk.

EFE, the news agency, is tonight reporting that the company is preparing a report, to be presented tomorrow to Spains’ aviation authority, admitting that it has run out of cash and cannot continue to operate.

AENA, the airports authority, is preparing for a wave of cancellations as from midnight, and has already started to negotiate with other carriers to ensure passengers can continue with their journeys. The Spanair website was taken offline earlier this afternoon with no explanation, with just a telephone number.

The company owes 150 million euros in direct loans, has been losing money for months, and has large unpaid fuel bills, says El Mundo.

Meanwhile, unions warn that apart from the 2,000 jobs likely to be lost at the airline, a further 1,200 ground staff are also likely to be laid off, as their jobs depend upon servicing the airline.

Spanair was the airline whose plan crashed at Barajas airport several years ago, killing several hundred, and whose engineers are currently in court charged with manslaughter and negligence.

El Mundo – Spanair airline goes bust

Spain’s unemployment rate has jumped to nearly 24pc in the fourth quarter, Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro said on Thursday, confirming that the country is still in the throes of a long and painful economic crisis.

Mr Montoro told a parliamentary commission on Thursday that official figures due out Friday will show 5.4m people were out of work at the end of December, up from 4.9m in the third quarter, when the jobless rate was 21.5pc.

Spain already has the highest unemployment rate in the 17-nation eurozone and is near its record of 24.5pc unemployment, set in 1993.

The new conservative Popular Party government has pledged major labor reforms in a desperate bid to halt further job losses. A similarly-aimed reform in 2010 by the previous Socialist government appears not to hav
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9041862/Spains-Finance-Minister-Cristobal-Montoro-admits-unemployment-rate-has-jumped-to-24pc.html

Posted from WordPress for Android – mobile blogging!

You could do worse than check out www.securimport.com from Valencia.

Not only are their prices excellent, I was impressed enough by their aftersales service to write this unsolicited praise!

They specialise in CCTV units, with a central box controlling a set of camaras, and sell you the whole kit. The units are good quality and robust, easy to install and quick to get going, even streaming it over the net.

Cajamar, our local savings bank whose hq is in Almería, has been forced into a number of shotgun marriages over the last two years, as the central government made it merge with poorer, on-the-brink savings banks from across the country, and today will see the signing of the greatest merger of them all, as Cajamar merges with Ruralcaja to become Spain’s largest savings bank, with 44% of the national market.

The signing will take place today at La Envía Hotel in Vícar, and sees the final culmination of the mergers of 22 different entities to become one strong bank, with a 63 billion euro turnover, 38 billion euros worth of assets, 3,3 million clients and 6352 workers across 1465 offices nationwide. It’s solvency coefficient will be 12,33% at the point of merger, making it one of Spain’s most liquid banks (that’s the ratio of internal resources to risk assets – the EU sets the minimum level a bank should have at 8%).

The new savings bank will be called “Caja Rurales Unidas, SCC” and will keep its HQ in Almería city. The new President of the bank will the current VP of Cajamar, Juan de la Cruz Cárdenas Rodríguez, as current President Antonio Pérez Lao will be stepping down in order to give the new company “a relevant and fresh approach”, whatever that means.

Goodbye Cajamar, hello CRU.