Santander to buy struggling rival Banco Popular for €1

SANTANDER is to buy struggling rival Banco Popular for a nominal one euro after it was determined by European authorities that the bank is on the verge of insolvency.

Santander – Spain’s biggest bank – will ask investors for around €7 billion of fresh capital to cover the cost of boosting Popular.

Popular has come into trouble due to mounting risky property loans worth billions of euros.

The rescue is the first use of an EU regime to deal with failing banks, which was adopted after the 2008 financial crisis.

Instead using taxpayers’ money to save the bank, the method imposes steep losses on shareholders and some creditors.

The move has been described as ‘unexpected’.

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Laurence Dollimore

Laurence Dollimore is a Spanish-speaking, NCTJ-trained journalist with almost a decade’s worth of experience.
The London native has a BA in International Relations from the University of Leeds and and an MA in the same subject from Queen Mary University London.
He earned his gold star diploma in multimedia journalism at the prestigious News Associates in London in 2016, before immediately joining the Olive Press at their offices on the Costa del Sol.
After a five-year stint, Laurence returned to the UK to work as a senior reporter at the Mail Online, where he remained for two years before coming back to the Olive Press as Digital Editor in 2023.
He continues to work for the biggest newspapers in the UK, who hire him to investigate and report on stories in Spain.
These include the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Mail Online, Mail on Sunday and The Sun and Sun Online.
He has broken world exclusives on everything from the Madeleine McCann case to the anti-tourism movement in Tenerife.

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