EU starts helping evacuate Italians from Gulf states
The European Union has begun helping Italy repatriate its citizens stranded due to the war in the Middle East, the bloc's crisis management chief told AFP on Tuesday.
Commissioner Hadja Lahbib said Italy, Austria and Slovakia were the first countries so far to ask Brussels to assist in funding flights from the region.
Under the EU's "civil protection mechanism" member states can get the bloc's executive to reimburse them for the bulk of the costs.
Italy on Tuesday continued to evacuate its citizens from Gulf nations, including around 300 people flown back to Rome from Muscat in Oman and a group of 200 mostly students from Abu Dhabi who were being flown to Milan, the foreign ministry said.
Milan stock market plummets amid Middle East turmoil
Milan's stock exchange suffered losses of 3.9 percent by market close on Tuesday amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported.
Milan's was the worst-hit European stock market after Madrid, which closed with 4.55 percent drop.
Italian residents could see their energy bills rise by as much as 15 percent rise from the start of April, Davide Tabarelli, the president of energy-focused research consultancy Nomisma Energia, told Ansa news agency.
The European Central Bank's chief economist Philip Lane warned in an interview published in the Financial Times on Tuesday that the war could trigger a "spike" in eurozone inflation due to the disruption of energy flows as Iran closes off the Strait of Hormuz.
Inflation accelerates to 1.6 percent
Inflation accelerated in Italy in February, reaching 1.6 percent year-on-year compared with 1 percent in January, according to preliminary estimates published on Tuesday by national statistics institute Istat.
The acceleration is due in particular to price increases in services (from 2.5 percent to 3.6 percent), from transport to leisure, as well as unprocessed food products.
The continued decline in energy prices before the start of the war in Iran (from -6.2% in January to -6.6% in February) did not offset the rise in services, according to AFP's analysis of the data.
Italian inflation remains below the European average, which rose to 1.9 percent in February, just below the ECB's target, according to preliminary estimates published by Eurostat.
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