{"id":365477,"date":"2026-04-05T23:20:35","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T23:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/365477\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T23:20:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T23:20:35","slug":"france-announces-crisis-loans-for-firms-hit-by-fuel-price-surge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/365477\/","title":{"rendered":"France announces crisis loans for firms hit by fuel-price surge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n                        France said Friday it was launching an emergency loan programme to help small and medium-sized businesses exposed to soaring fuel prices driven by the war in the Middle East.\n                    <\/p>\n<p>The economy ministry said firms in the transportation, agriculture and fisheries industries would be eligible for the &#8220;flash fuel loans&#8221; of up to \u20ac50,000 ($57,600).<\/p>\n<p>The programme fulfils a pledge made last week by Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, whose government, like many worldwide, is seeking to contain the economic pain caused by the war&#8217;s impact on fuel prices.<\/p>\n<p>Public investment bank Bpifrance will issue the loans via a streamlined digital process that will make the money available within seven days, the ministry said in a statement.<\/p>\n<p>The three-year loans will have an interest rate of 3.8 percent.<\/p>\n<p>Separately, French Economy Minister Roland Lescure said he had written to the European Commission to ask it to investigate whether the continent&#8217;s refineries were taking advantage of the war to commit &#8220;abuses&#8221; in setting fuel prices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"France said Friday it was launching an emergency loan programme to help small and medium-sized businesses exposed to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-365477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}