Amsterdam  - Dutch insurer Aegon suffered a loss of 1.2 billion euros (1.53 billion dollars) in the fourth quarter of 2009, the company said in its preliminary Q4 report released on Tuesday.

Financial analysts had expected a loss of 800 million euros.

Following the publication of the results, the share value of Aegon dropped by 3.1 per cent at the Amsterdam stock exchange and stood at 3.6 euros shortly after trading began on Tuesday.

Amsterdam -  will have to look around for a new sponsor for next season after Dutch insurance conglomerate ING announced on Monday that they would not be renewing their three-year sponsorship with Renault.

Earlier Credit Suisse had announced that they would not be sponsoring BMW-Sauber this year.

ING said they would cut back their sponsorship investment by 40 per cent this year already, without saying whether they would cut back the money given to Renault during the season.

Amsterdam - The Dutch economy has formally slid into a recession, with fourth-quarter 2008 figures published Friday showing a 0.9 per cent drop from the preceding quarter.

The Central Bureau of Statistics figures were the second straight quarter in which the Dutch economy shrank, thereby fulfilling the formal definition of a recession.

The fourth quarter statistics also point to the biggest quarter- to-quarter decline of the Dutch economy since the early 1980s.

On an annual basis, the fourth-quarter 2008 economy was down 0.6 per cent from the final quarter of 2007, the first year-to-year quarterly drop in five years for the Dutch economy.

Amsterdam - Dutch banking and insurance giant ING announced Wednesday it would scrap 2,700 jobs in the Netherlands as part of worldwide cutbacks unveiled last month.

The group told staff that 1,000 workers would be made redundant, with a further 1,700 positions lost as vacancies were cancelled and retiring staff not replaced.

ING announced on January 26 that it was to lose 7,000 employees worldwide, but Wednesday's announcment was the first concrete details of where the cuts would come.

Amsterdam - A Dutch Catholic priest has been allowed to retain a formal relationship with a woman after a deadline for an appeal against the union expired, Dutch media reported Wednesday.

A Catholic court had previously ruled that Dutch priest Ruud Huysmans could not be held accountable for violating Church law when he had entered a "registered partnership" - a kind of legal cohabitation system in the Netherlands - in the year 2000, a year before a church ban on such partnerships took effect.

The appeal deadline for the ruling expired Wednesday.

In 2008, Rotterdam bishop Ad van Luyn had requested the Catholic court to disband the registered partnership which Huysmans had entered with female theologian Freda Droes.