Spanish national carrier Iberia is to launch a low cost carrier in October to take on rivals like Ryanair, easyJet and Air Berlin which have taken much of its market.
The new, unnamed carrier will be based at Barcelona and initially fly on domestic routes and to Germany and the UK.
Iberia will put up 24m of the 50m launch costs. The rest will come from its four partners, Cobra Group, a part of the ACS building group, Iberostar, a tour operator, Nefinsa, a holding company of the Serratosa family and Quercus, a private equity company.
Each of the five will have 20% of the voting rights.
The new airline will be managed independently of Iberia although the established carrier has offered the newcomer deals on maintenance, code sharing and ground handling "under market conditions."
The new operator will start with five aircraft but hopes to increase that to 30 by 2008.
It long expected arrival is likely to allow Iberia to concentrate on its more profitable long haul routes out of Madrid, especially to the USA and South America, and drop some of its loss-making domestic services.
RBS/CWT extend card deal to Germany
The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) have extended their corporate card deal, begun in the UK in April last year, to cover Germany.
Unlike the British agreement which was aimed mainly at the SME market, the German deal is for all corporates.
Under the deal, CWT clients will have the opportunity to use RBS corporate cards to pay for business trips with all spending captured by CWT's MI system.
Thomas Zimmermann, head of corporate business at RBS subsidiary RDE which handles the card, said that the card deal would give CWT clients flexibility, transparency and savings.