Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio said on Friday that he would rather defend Italian people than bow to markets if forced to make a choice. The Italian government, targets a fiscal deficit at 2.4 percent of gross domestic product next year, three times the target set by the previous executive and putting the country on a collision course with the European Commission. Source Reuters
Dutch airline KLM is cutting another 800 to 1 thousand jobs. The aviation sector is not recovering and it is increasingly difficult to make ends meet, the Dutch airline announced on Thursday.
KLM is cutting 500 full-time jobs among the cabin crew, 100 jobs among pilots, and 200 to 400 jobs among the ground crew. This comes on top of the 5 thousand job cuts the airline announced last year with its reorganization plans to get through the coronavirus pandemic. Source NLTimes
Fraport Greece reported a 71.4% annual decline in passenger traffic last year at the 14 regional airports it operates in Greece. The total number of passengers who used the airports of Thessaloniki, Corfu, Hania, Cephalonia, Zakynthos, Aktio, Kavala, Rhodes, Kos, Samos, Mytilene, Mykonos, Santorini and Skiathos reached 8,611,780, of which 5,994,180 were on international flights – a year-on-year decline of 74.2%. Source Ekathimerini
Russian oil drilling giant Gazprom Neft opened a crypto mining farm running on associated gas energy unlocking the power of Russia’s oil and gas resources for the needs of bitcoin (BTC) mining, reports Yahoo Finance. The venue for cryptocurrency mining is on one of the company’s oil drilling sites in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug in Siberia. It is using the associated gas from Gazprom Neft’s oil field as an energy source and has its own power plant to transform this gas into electricity. Source Realnoevremya
