TheChek News Flow

Extreme flooding caused by Storm Daniel devastates Greece

Heavy rainfall kills at least 7 people as fire department evacuates thousands from worst-hit areas

Extreme rainfall and flooding have claimed the lives of at least seven people in central and northern Greece after Storm Daniel swept across the region for three consecutive days, causing billions of euros of damage, destroying properties and leaving large areas without electricity and water.

Hundreds of people, waiting to be evacuated as floodwaters exceeded 2 metres in some areas, were found stranded in their homes on Friday. Since the floods started on Tuesday, more than 1,900 rescues have taken place in Thessaly, the main region hit by the storm, and the wider area, according to the fire department, while more than 6,000 calls for help were recorded.

Prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited the region on Friday, reassuring local authorities that “we will do everything humanly possible” to help affected areas. He also stressed that he would mobilise “whatever resources are available” from the EU to assist the recovery operation.

The floods followed two weeks of large-scale wildfires in northeastern Greece, intensifying concerns about extreme weather patterns caused by climate change across southern Europe. The wildfires were the largest recorded in the EU to date, according to the EU’s Copernicus monitoring service. Storm Daniel also hit areas of Turkey and Bulgaria.

Kostas Agorastos, governor of Thessaly, told the state broadcaster ERT that the damage caused by the storm was valued at more than €2bn.

“The recording of the damages will begin immediately [as will] compensation for the houses that have been destroyed”, Mitsotakis said at a meeting with mayors in Karditsa, one of the worst-hit towns in the region.

According to Greek officials the rainfall measured over one 12-hour period — more than 700 tonnes per acre — was nearly double the amount that typically falls on Athens in one year.

More evacuation orders were issued on Friday as authorities sent alerts to mobile phones in the area, warning that the Pineios River was overflowing. Parts of Larissa, Thessaly’s administrative capital and largest city which is situated 20km from the river, were already starting to flood.

The Thessalian plain is Greece’s main agricultural breadbasket and accounts for more than 22 per cent of the country’s agricultural production. Much of the region’s agricultural resources have now been destroyed.

“I don’t think we have realised the magnitude of this disaster yet,” said Professor Efthymios Lekkas, a disaster management expert, on ERT. Significant deposits of clay and silt, up to half a metre thick, would prevent the cultivation of crops for the foreseeable future, he said, adding that it would take at least five years for the plain to be fertile again.

Annual auction received no bids, but all is not lost

In tennis one calls this result a bagel, a zero. The UK’s latest annual power auction received no offshore wind power project bids, the government said on Friday. It had served up a power price cap equivalent to about £60 per megawatt hour in today’s prices. That proved too low. Nevertheless, this could be good news for the wind industry.

Consider this a predictable surprise. A pre-announced price cap was about a fifth below a recent Irish Sea auction. Some companies had moaned publicly about the proposed UK price. That offered a warning. Wind farm companies refused to participate.

All is not lost. German bureaucrats took a parsimonious view on their price cap in a December wind auction, producing a historically low subscription rate near 20 per cent. Higher prices in the next two quarterly auctions earlier this year boosted that interest about seven times.

This issue is not limited to Europe. Massachusetts had to cancel offshore wind projects when bidders pulled out. Seeing this, New York watchdogs sound more pragmatic. They are considering petitions for increased power purchase agreements. These average 48 per cent on four projects from auction winners including Equinor, BP and Ørsted, notes Deepa Venkateswaran at Bernstein.

New York does not want delays. But these will hit the UK offshore wind sector if the British government does not act promptly. With no change to the schedule, an upward adjustment to the price cap would require a year’s wait. Plus some earlier wind projects are also stalling. The government could miss its offshore wind capacity target of 50GW for 2030.

Any fault goes to bureaucrats concerned about inflationary pressures. But natural gas volatility is the main factor in power price fluctuations. In coming years, offshore wind can offer more additional scale than most other renewable power sources. That means the sooner offshore wind power comes on stream the faster gas can be replaced.

Swedish company latest group to exit country following its invasion of Ukraine

The Russian assets of Volvo AB, the Swedish truckmaker, are to be transferred to a local investor, according to a Russian ministry of trade statement reported by the Interfax news agency.

A Volvo AB representative told the Financial Times the transaction was a “voluntary divestment” as a result of the group’s working to liquidate its assets in Russia after the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The statement did not name the new owner, but Russia’s company registry showed that control of several Volvo AB subsidiaries passed this week to Igor Kim, the main shareholder in Expobank, who has been involved in multiple transfers of ownership of foreign companies, and his business partners.

It was unclear on Friday whether Volvo had received any proceeds from the deal. The transaction’s complexities underline the challenges facing foreign companies still doing business in Russia either because of reluctance to leave or because of the gradually increasing restrictions imposed by the Russian authorities on divestments.

Volvo suspended all its sales, service and production activities in Russia on February 28 last year, four days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Volvo’s main asset in Russia, which accounted for around 3 per cent of group net sale before the suspension, was a factory in Kaluga, 180km south-east of Moscow, that produced around 3,000 vehicles annually under the Volvo and Renault brands.

Volvo booked a provision of SKr4.1bn in April 2022 for its Russian business, saying that it had total assets in the country of about SKr9bn.

A group representative told Vedomosti newspaper last October that it was considering selling the Russian business because it could not currently conduct operations in Russia. It had begun to “adapt” the business and was making employees redundant, the representative said.

Control of several Volvo Group subsidiaries in Russia transferred on Wednesday to Kim, Expobank’s main shareholder, and his business partners, information from the Russian company registry shows.

On Thursday, Expobank’s first deputy chair Alexey Sannikov was appointed chief executive of the Kaluga plant.

Expobank grew out of the former Russia business of Barclays, the UK bank, and has been owned by Kim since the UK bank left the Russian market in 2011. Expobank had been involved in financing a number of exit deals, several people from the Russian banking industry told the FT.

While many of Russia’s top banks have had their wings clipped by western sanctions, lower-profile banks such as Expobank, the 41st largest bank in Russia by assets, have filled the void. Expobank has not faced any restrictions.

Natasha Tsukanova, managing director of Xenon Capital, which is advising on several exit deals, said that arranging financing to buy exiting foreign companies had become a “complex challenge” for Russian buyers.

“With access to international capital markets all but non-existent, Russian buyers often resort to smaller lenders,” she said.

Expobank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this year, Russian officials said that various investors, including companies from Belarus and China, were queueing up to buy the Volvo AB assets.

“Taking into account the intensity and status of our relationship, the Russians are ready to essentially give us this plant for free,” the Belarusian ambassador to Russia said in July.

However, Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin subsequently advised the Belarusian government to contact their Russian counterparts because decisions had already been made about the business.

Tech company warned that iPhones and iPads were open to being targeted by state-level clients of Israeli group NSO

Apple has issued an emergency software update after being warned that a previously unknown vulnerability allowed Israel’s NSO Group to inject its Pegasus spyware remotely and surreptitiously on to iPhones and iPads.

The weakness in the iOS code, called a zero-day, appears to have allowed NSO customers, which include Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and Mexico, to hide code within images sent via iMessage that would allow the military-grade Pegasus spyware to take over a phone’s functions.

Pegasus is able to surreptitiously read encrypted messages stored on the phone, turn on its camera and microphone remotely and continuously track the phone’s location, and has been tied to human rights abuses from Mexico to east Africa, resulting in the Israeli company being blacklisted by the US Department of Commerce.

The patch also addresses a vulnerability that affected the Apple Wallet, where people store payment cards, the company said in a brief statement on Thursday night without providing more details as it pushed the update out to billions of phones.

This latest patch, among a handful that Apple has issued in recent years, continues a cat-and-mouse game between leading US tech companies and spyware manufacturers, many of them based in Israel, which weaponise and then commercialise unknown vulnerabilities in smartphones so that their clients, which tend to be government agencies, can surveil thousands of targets without being detected.

NSO said: “We are unable to respond to any allegations that do not include any supporting research.”

While NSO has maintained that its product is only meant to be used to monitor potential terrorists and fight organised crime, this vulnerability was discovered by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which said it found it on the phone of a Washington, DC-based employee of a “civil society” organisation with international offices.

Citizen Lab has previously traced the spyware to the phones of hundreds of dissidents, journalists, lawyers and opposition leaders in countries with poor human rights records.

The US government blacklisting was prompted by the discovery of Pegasus on the phones of US embassy employees in Uganda, leading to spyware such as that of NSO being listed as a major counter-intelligence and national security threat to the American government.

The discovery of the latest vulnerability underlines how NSO continues to find rare weaknesses in some of the sophisticated operating systems, despite dire financial problems stemming from the US government’s sanctions against it.

Staffed almost entirely by veterans of the Israeli army’s elite signals intelligence units, the company was once valued at $1bn by its London-based private equity backers, Novalpina Capital.

But a 2019 hack engineered by NSO to inject its spyware using a vulnerability in the ubiquitous WhatsApp messaging platform, resulted in a lawsuit in a California court by WhatsApp’s owner Meta, joined by Apple, Amazon and other tech giants.

In that lawsuit, which is continuing, NSO has argued that its actions should be immune from legal scrutiny since its software is used by sovereign nations, and the company does not have visibility on who the targets are.

In recent weeks, at least three other people, including a UK-based political reporter for the Daily Mail, received notifications from Apple that their phones had been attacked by “state actors”. It’s not yet clear if those attacks originated from NSO’s systems or those of its competitors.

“These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are or what you do,” the notification read.

Gapping up
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

Other news:

Analyst comments:

Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:

Other news:

Analyst comments:

Quarante-trois après l’explosion inexpliquée d’un avion près de l’île italienne qui a tué 81 personnes, l’ancien président du conseil italien Giuliano Amato reprend la thèse d’une implication française.

La catastrophe aérienne survenue près de l’île d’Ustica, dans la soirée du 27 juin 1980, fait partie des nombreux événements meurtriers partiellement inexpliqués qui parsèment l’histoire de l’Italie républicaine et continuent de hanter sa mémoire. Samedi 2 septembre, l’idée d’une implication de la France dans le drame sur fonds de tensions géopolitiques, alors fortes entre Paris et la Libye, a été relancée par un ancien président du conseil italien, Giuliano Amato. Dans un entretien accordé au quotidien national La Repubblica, il reprend la thèse défendue par les familles des victimes selon laquelle un avion français aurait été à l’origine d’un tir de missile dont l’explosion aurait touché le DC-9, qui assurait une liaison entre Bologne et Palerme, entraînant la mort de ses quatre-vingt-un occupants.

« La version la plus crédible est celle de la responsabilité de l’aviation française avec la complicité des Américains », déclare ainsi M. Amato, 85 ans, chef de l’exécutif italien de 1992 à 1993 puis de 2000 à 2001. L’ancien responsable politique précise s’être intéressé au dossier en 1986, alors qu’il était secrétaire d’Etat auprès du président du conseil Bettino Craxi. Le scénario des événements auquel il accorde le plus de crédit dans son entretien voudrait qu’un avion de chasse français ait pris pour cible dans le ciel italien un appareil libyen dans lequel aurait dû se trouver le Guide de la révolution Mouammar Kadhafi (1942-2011), déclenchant un tir dont les passagers du DC-9 auraient été les victimes collatérales.

La tentative d’assassinat aurait été planifiée, selon lui, sous couvert d’exercices militaires de l’OTAN en Méditerranée. M. Amato affirme que Kadhafi avait été prévenu de la machination par M. Craxi, alors secrétaire du Parti socialiste italien, mais que des combats aériens impliquant des appareils libyens ont tout de même eu lieu autour de l’avion de ligne en route pour la Sicile. Selon lui, un ou deux chasseurs libyens s’étant placés dans son sillage pour se cacher des radars, un tir les visant aurait détruit le DC-9.

Mort d’une vingtaine de témoins

A l’époque du drame d’Ustica, Mouammar Kadhafi, bien que proche de l’Italie, était à la tête d’un régime anti-occidental et se trouvait engagé dans un conflit au Tchad dans lequel la France soutenait ses adversaires. La piste d’un lien entre l’accident et les tensions qui opposaient alors Paris et Tripoli s’est révélée délicate à suivre pour les enquêteurs, mais a fait plusieurs fois irruption dans le débat public – une affaire dont le caractère singulier n’a jamais perdu l’attention des Italiens. L’enquête a en effet été freinée par une myriade d’obstacles, émaillée de la mort jugée suspecte d’une vingtaine de témoins, d’après le décompte du journaliste d’investigation considéré comme un grand spécialiste de l’affaire d’Ustica, Andrea Purgatori.

En 2007, Francesco Cossiga (1928-2010), chef de l’exécutif italien au moment de l’accident, avait déjà attribué, dans les médias italiens, la responsabilité du tir à la France, déclenchant la réouverture de l’enquête. En 2011, le juge Rosario Priore, chargé du dossier pendant dix ans, a dénoncé des obstructions françaises. Mais, en 2013, la Cour de cassation italienne a fini par attribuer l’explosion meurtrière à un missile air-air, sans établir pour autant la nationalité de l’appareil depuis lequel il avait été tiré.

Les déclarations de Giuliano Amato relancent donc une hypothèse largement partagée dans les milieux concernés par l’affaire en Italie, mais qui n’a jamais été établie par la justice. Daria Bonfietti, qui a perdu un frère dans l’explosion et préside l’association des familles de victimes, s’est exprimée elle aussi, samedi, dans La Repubblica, appelant la France à « mettre fin aux mensonges des Etats ». A la fin de son entretien, Giuliano Amato a pour sa part lancé un appel : « Je me demande pourquoi un jeune président comme Macron (…) ne veut pas lever la honte qui pèse sur la France. Il peut [le faire] de deux manières : en démontrant que cette thèse est infondée ou (…) en adressant les excuses les plus vives à l’Italie et aux familles des victimes au nom de son gouvernement. »

Dans les heures qui ont suivi sa parution, la présidente du conseil, Giorgia Meloni, dont le mandat a été marqué par plusieurs crises avec Paris, a déclaré que les paroles « importantes et méritant l’attention » de M. Amato étaient « le fruit de déductions personnelles ». Elle l’invitait toutefois à faire savoir s’il détenait des éléments précis permettant de rouvrir l’enquête et de les mettre à disposition, le cas échéant, « afin que le gouvernement puisse prendre toutes les mesures possibles ». Samedi, le ministère français des affaires étrangères a affirmé que la France avait fourni « les éléments à sa disposition à chaque fois qu’elle a été sollicitée » et restait « disposé[e] à y travailler avec l’Italie si elle le demande ».