Catalonia cuts lossmaking Spanair loose

Catalonia’s dreams of running its own airline crashed over the weekend after the indebted Spanish region was forced to cut loose Spanair, its loss making domestic carrier, leaving thousands stranded in airports across the country, the FT reports. Spanair, Spain’s fifth-largest carrier by passengers, will this week file for bankruptcy protection after grounding flights on Friday as a last-ditch attempt by the Catalan government to secure investment from Qatar failed. An estimated 22,000 passengers have been affected by the collapse, and more than 2,000 employees will lose their jobs at a time when the country’s jobless rate last week rose to 5.27m, or almost 23 per cent. Spanair, created in mid-1980s by SAS, the Scandinavian airline, was taken over by the Catalan state in 2009 as part of a drive by the region’s government at the time to secure the Barcelona El Prat airport’s status as an aviation hub to rival Madrid’s Barajas. Bloomberg reports this is the first collapse of a scheduled European airline since the last recession.