FRANKFURT/VIENNA, March 26 (Reuters) – When Wolfgang Eder
and his team started looking around for a site for a new plant
for Voestalpine, the Austrian steelmaker he heads,
they had 17 sites in eight countries on their list.

This month, after more than a year of looking, they settled
on the U.S. state of Texas, after a boom in the production of
natural gas from shale extraction brought gas prices down to
just a quarter of what companies paid in Europe.

VIENNA/BUCHAREST, March 21 (Reuters) – Austria’s Raiffeisen
Bank International has agreed to buy Citibank’s
retail portfolio in Romania, which has more than 90 million
euros ($117 million) in assets, it said on Thursday.

The deal – worth less than 100 million euros according to a
source familiar with the situation – is the first such
acquisition since Raiffeisen bought Polbank, the Polish arm of
Greece’s EFG Eurobank Ergasias, last year.

VIENNA (Reuters) – Red Bull’s unusual decision to go public on a blackmailer’s threat to contaminate its energy drinks with faeces could cost the brand far less long-term than any immediate hit to sales.

Known for investing heavily in marketing its drinks and sports events, the privately owned Austrian company reveals little about itself. So its announcement on Thursday of a criminal threat to taint its drinks came as a particular surprise.

VIENNA, March 13 (Reuters) – Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine
has picked Texas as the location for a new 550 million
euro ($716 million) sponge iron plant, a sign that cheap U.S.
energy prices are attracting industrial investment as Europe
lags behind.

The plant, Voestalpine’s biggest foreign investment to date,
is due to begin operations in early 2016 and is part of the
steelmaker’s plan to boost its sales through aggressive
expansion in the Americas and Asia.

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria cannot draw a line under its Nazi past despite the desire of many Austrians to so do, its president said on the 75th anniversary of the country’s annexation by Nazi Germany.

Adolf Hitler and his troops marched unopposed on March 12, 1938 into an Austria weakened by political and economic turmoil and were cheered by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom took part enthusiastically in the Holocaust that followed.

VIENNA, March 11 (Reuters) – The famed Vienna Philharmonic
has acknowledged that many of its musicians were Nazi party
members during Hitler’s rule and that its director may have
delivered a prestigious orchestra award to a Nazi war criminal
two decades after the end of World War Two.

The orchestra, which has come under fire for covering up its
history, on Sunday night published details for the first time
about its conduct during the Nazi era, including biographies of
Jewish members who were driven out and sent to death camps.

VIENNA (Reuters) – Marina Plistiev, a Kyrgyzstan-born Jew, has lived in Vienna for 34 years but still doesn’t like to take public transport.

She recalls the day in 1986 as a teenager when she and her four-year-old brother, whom she’d collected from school with a fever, were told to get off a tram for having the wrong tickets, and nobody stuck up for them, apparently because they were Jews.

VIENNA, March 10 (Reuters) – The world-famous Vienna
Philharmonic orchestra will publish details of its history
during the Nazi era on Sunday, responding to years of
accusations of a cover-up.

Austria took several decades after World War Two to
acknowledge and voice regret for its central role in Hitler’s
Third Reich and Holocaust. The country will solemnly mark the
75th anniversary on Tuesday of its annexation by Nazi Germany.

VIENNA, March 8 (Reuters) – Moody’s kept its negative
outlook for Austria’s banking system on Friday, citing a
weakening operating environment, rising bad debt charges and a
limited capacity of many banks to absorb losses.

The credit ratings agency said these negative factors were
only partly counter-balanced by what it saw as the modest
funding risks of most Austrian banks.

VIENNA, March 6 (Reuters) – Austrian energy group Verbund’s
profits rose less than expected in 2012 as electricity
prices fell due to stagnating demand in the recession-hit euro
zone and market upheaval in Germany, the continent’s biggest
market.

European utilities have resorted to selling off assets amid
weak demand from manufacturers, key consumers of energy and
plunging wholesale prices in Germany, where heavy subsidies for
renewables are causing a glut.