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Arvind Kejriwal arrested in Nitin Gadkari defamation case

New Delhi: Aam Aadmi Party convenor Arvind Kejriwal was on Wednesday taken into judicial custody by the Delhi Police in connection with the a criminal defamation complaint filed by senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Nitin Gadkari. Kejriwal had alleged that Gadkari was one of the most corrupt leaders of India following which the BJP leader had moved court. Kejriwal refused to submit a personal bond of Rs [...]

Q&A with Jerome Champagne, Candidate for FIFA President in 2015

FIFA, the governing body of world soccer, is no stranger to controversy. Allegations of bribery, corruption and vote-rigging have swirled around the organization for years, many of them recently centered on Qatar and its winning bid for the 2022 World Cup. Jerome Champagne, a French former diplomat and FIFA executive, wants the chance to right the ship. Jerome Champagne is running for FIFA president next year. Reuters [...]

Workers at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi Site Faced Harsh Conditions

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The strike had entered its second day when construction workers at Labor Camp 42 got word that their bosses from the BK Gulf corporation had come to negotiate. Mohammed Amir Waheed Sirkar, an electrician from Bangladesh, scrambled down the stairs to meet them. But when he got to the courtyard, he saw the truth: It wasn’t the bosses who had come. [...]

Lamprell to raise $120m on way to recovery

Oil rig maker Lamprell said on Friday it would raise about $120 million to boost its productivity after returning to profit last year despite growing risk in the sector. Chief executive officer James Moffat said the rights issue marked "the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle in our recovery", which had started around 18 months ago. It will be used to support investment, facilitate debt refinancing and [...]

Samsung chairman stable after heart attack

Samsung Electronics Co Chairman Lee Kun Hee, who leads Asia’s biggest technology company and helps generate about a quarter of South Korea’s economic output, remains in stable condition after emergency surgery following a heart attack. Lee, 72, is at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul after being resuscitated following an acute myocardial infarction, Rhee So Eui, a spokeswoman for Samsung Group, said in an e-mailed statement. Lee, who [...]

Dubai sells $1.7b German business

Dubai International Capital, the private equity arm of Dubai Holding, today announced that it has signed an agreement for the sale of Mauser Group to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice  for  $1.7 billion. Mauser, which was acquired by DIC in 2007 in a deal that valued the Group at c. $1.1 billion, is a worldwide leading producer of rigid industrial packaging with approximately 4,400 employees and consolidated revenues [...]

ME private equity market revives

As Dubai freight-forwarding firm Able Logistics Group began preparing early this year to go public, it conducted a leveraged recapitalisation, taking on fresh bank debt so it could pay a cash dividend to shareholders. By the standards of developed Western markets, the transaction was routine. But for the Middle East it was an unusually creative deal, a sign that the region's private equity industry is finally building [...]

Lufthansa CEO reopens old wound with a hit on Emirates

Deutsche Lufthansa’s new chief executive officer identified the menace of fast-expanding Gulf carriers such as Dubai-based Emirates as his biggest challenge, threatening to reopen a war of words with Mid-East operators. Carsten Spohr, who takes over from Christoph Franz as CEO of the German company on May 1, said the emerging long-haul heavyweights represent a different proposition to short-haul discount operators such as Ryanair Holdings Plc. “Those [...]

Emaar may list mall unit on DFM

Emaar Properties is talking to regulators about the possibility of listing its shopping malls unit on Dubai Financial Market (DFM), the emirate's main bourse, instead of Nasdaq Dubai, sources aware of the matter said on Monday. Last month, Dubai's biggest property firm hired Morgan Stanley to manage an 8-9 billion dirham ($2.2-2.5 billion) listing of the unit, which would be one of the biggest equity deals in [...]

Final bids for Dubai stake in German firm tomorrow

Buyers are lining up for Germany-based packaging group Mauser with final bids due to be submitted on Monday, banking sources said on Friday. The sale of Mauser by Dubai International Capital (DIC) could fetch around 1.25 billion euros ($1.73 billion), one of the banking sources said. At this price, the sale would be one of the largest asset disposals by the emirate since its debt crisis in [...]

Jim Sheridan launches Arabic film festival to find the next Omar Sharif

Omar Sharif, right, is guest of honour for the inaugural Dublin Arabic film festival founded by Irish director Jim Sheridan, left. Omar Sharif is undoubtedly the biggest film star from the Arab world, an icon since he first emerged as a wobbling, pixelated speck on a desert horizon in Lawrence of Arabia. Unfortunately, to many he's the only film star from the Arab world, something that Irish [...]

Zain sued for $4.5b over Iraqi acquisition

Zain is being sued for $4.5 billion over its 2007 acquisition of an Iraqi telecom operator, the Kuwaiti firm said in a bourse statement on Sunday. Zain bought Iraqna for $1.2 billion from Orascom Telecom in December 2007 after the Egyptian firm dropped out of the running for a long-term mobile license in Iraq. The Kuwaiti firm then merged its Iraqi unit, Atheer, with Iraqna and renamed [...]

Women edge into Gulf board rooms

Amina al-Rustamani, a member of a prominent UAE family, raised eyebrows among friends and relatives when she started her career in Dubai 13 years ago as an electrical engineer, becoming one of few females in the Middle East to enter the profession. Success in a male-dominated environment helped give her the confidence to rise up the career ladder and break more barriers. She is now chief executive [...]

JPMorgan leaps to No.2 slot for Gulf bonds

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is gaining ground in the debt markets of Gulf Cooperation Council states after the biggest U.S. bank helped manage this month’s Islamic bond sale by Saudi Arabia’s utility. JPMorgan is the biggest bond underwriter after HSBC Holdings  in the six-nation GCC in 2014, its best start to a year since 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The New York-based lender advised on [...]

Guardian apologises to Dubai ruler

The Guardian newspaper has issued an apology to the ruler Dubai for the publishing of allegations that his office had advertised for a number of female assistants to help with a shopping trip in Europe. Last week, the Guardian reported that the Gulf country's leader, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashed al-Makhtoum, had placed the ad with an Italian fashion agency. The article was published on April 7 and was amended a day later. The [...]

Six Flags to develop amusement park in Dubai

Grand Prairie-based Six Flags Entertainment Corp. is again attempting to broaden its international reach beyond North America into the Middle East. The theme park owner and operator said it’s partnering with Meraas Leisure and Entertainment, a Dubai-based real estate development company, to open a Six Flags-branded park in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The project will open in 2017 and be located in a multi-themed park [...]

Abu Dhabi gets Cleaveland Clinic marquee brand

For decades the Cleveland Clinic has provided healthcare to the upper echelons of Middle Eastern society who fly halfway across the world for treatment at the Ohio-based private medical center. Soon, they can skip the trip. Early next year the Cleveland Clinic plans to open an ultra-modern, 364-bed specialty hospital on Al Maryah Island in Abu Dhabi, one of the most ambitious forays into the oil-rich country [...]

DMCC to tighten gold sourcing supervision

Dubai's gold trading centre said it would tighten supervision of how the metal is sourced after reports in the British media alleging it ignored international guidelines designed to prevent human rights abuses and underground trade by African warlords. In February, Britain's Guardian newspaper and the BBC said the Dubai-based Kaloti Group, a major gold refiner and jeweller, had failed to examine suspicious deals, accepting for example 2.4 [...]

Italian gets go-ahead to buy Leeds from Dubai firm

Italian businessman Massimo Cellino has been given approval to complete the purchase of second tier club Leeds United after an independent QC overturned the Football League's initial decision to block him. Cellino, president of Italian Serie A club Cagliari, agreed in February to buy a 75 percent stake in former English champions Leeds for a reported 25 million pounds ($41.48 million) from Dubai-based GFH Capital. However, the [...]

Citi says threat of Dubai bubble repeat remains

|By TAP Staff| A new Citibank report on Dubai property market asserts there is little room of investors to show complacency as the measures to curb speculative demand and to strengthen the prudential regulation of the real estate and banking sectors so far do not remove the threat of a repeat of property-led volatility of 2008-09. As Dubai’s property market booms and large-scale projects are announced, parallels [...]

Nokia protests new Indian tax move

Finland's Nokia, currently embroiled in an Indian Supreme Court tax case, said on Friday it has received a new 300 million euro sales tax bill from Tamil Nadu, a claim it considered "absurd". According to the company, authorities in the southern state had alleged that handsets from Nokia's Chennai plant were not exported but instead sold in India. Products exported from India are exempt from tax. "Nokia [...]

Dubai logistics firm plans year-end IPO

Buyout firm GrowthGate Capital plans to take freight-forwarding company Able Logistics Group public in Dubai around the end of this year, a senior GrowthGate executive told Reuters, in a sign of growing strength in the region's equity markets. "We aim to make it this year or early next year," Haythem Macki, a partner at GrowthGate, said. "The market is ready for it - there's a lot of [...]

Alibaba IPO: Hong Kong loss is US gain

After a year of waiting, the man running what could be the biggest-ever technology IPO finally lost patience with Hong Kong. Joe Tsai, the Alibaba Group Holding executive in charge of plans for the highly anticipated deal, only abandoned hope of a Hong Kong listing in the last few weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The company's shareholding structure, giving senior managers sway over board [...]

Emirates sees challenges from US Customs Post in Dubai

|By Rory Jones, Doug Cameron | The head of Emirates Airline said Tuesday that establishing a U.S. Customs post at its Dubai hub could create a logistical nightmare, just as the world’s largest carrier of international passengers ramps up for fresh expansion to North America. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency in January opened a post in Dubai’s neighbor, Abu Dhabi, to allow passengers there to [...]