A man walks on Jumeirah beach as the Burj Al Arab hotel is seen during sunset in Dubai. Reuters Dubai’s hotels experienced a bumper first half even as refurbishment at the emirate’s main airport grounded Emirates Airline jets and limited the number of passengers flying. Hotels in the desert-city, which has become known for its extravagant infrastructure, architecture and opulent places to stay, catered to 5.8 million […]
It’s slim, sleek, black and silver, and comes with Bluetooth. But unlike the latest mobile phone, you won’t be showing off the Black Pro 6500 to anyone outside your bathroom. This hi-tech gizmo from Oral-B – which has its own app – is the latest in toothbrush technology, and has a £250 price tag to match. It claims to be able to strip 100 per cent more […]
A broker monitors stock prices on a screen at the Saudi Investment Bank in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia plans to open its stock market, the Arab world’s biggest, to direct investment by foreign financial institutions in the first half of next year. Reuters The Wall Street Journal lists the top 10 companies by market value that might interest foreign investors once the market is opened up for direct […]
Local lenders in Saudi Arabia are dominating the market, prompting overseas banks to surrender their licenses as they struggle to compete, the chief executive officer of Standard Chartered (STAN) Plc in the country said. “International banks have found this market more challenging to find their edge and differentiate themselves enough to build a viable business,” Boutros Klink, chief executive officer of Standard Chartered Capital Saudi Arabia, said […]
Seventy-year-old Saudi Arabian stock speculator Mohamed al-Otaibi says he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the crash of 2006, but he’s back trading again as the Arab world’s biggest bourse prepares to open to direct foreign investment. The activities of Otaibi and many thousands like him mean there will be a clash of investment cultures when international institutions enter the $580 billion Saudi market early next […]
|By TAP Staff| Indians were the biggest foreign investors in Dubai property in the first half of this year, while Saudis dominated the GCC investors. According to statistics published by the Dubai Land Department, more than Dh10.5 billion was invested into the emirate’s property market by Indians out of a total of Dh37.5 billion spent by foreigners in the first six months of the year. During the […]
Shares of Abu Dhabi National Energy Co. (TAQA), which took an impairment of $858 million in North America last year, climbed the most in three weeks after it returned to profit in the second-quarter and said it plans to sell assets. The state-controlled utility, also known as Taqa, reported a second-quarter attributable profit of 239 million dirhams ($65 million), rebounding from a loss of 172 million a […]
Dubai’s two biggest builders are turning to bank borrowing to help fund projects as a rise in late payments from their customers takes the shine off a booming construction market. Arabtec Holding PJSC, the contractor that helped push Dubai stocks into a bear market in June, said money owed by clients rose to 8.8 billion dirhams ($2.4 billion) through the second quarter from 7.2 billion dirhams at […]
|By Rashidul Bari| Palestine and Israel, once known as cradle of civilization, have become the hub of cemeteries in modern times. Their conflict has shed untold blood and produced graves as far as the eye can see. The countless tombstones are silent, but the sound of their outcry has carried from Middle-East to here at New York University’s Bobst Library—where I’m writing this article—and from which I’m […]
The chemical triclosan has been linked to cancer-cell growth and disrupted development in animals. Regulators are reviewing whether it’s safe to put in soap, cutting boards and toys. Consumer companies are phasing it out. Minnesota voted in May to ban it in many products. At the same time, millions of Americans are putting it in their mouths every day, by way of a top-selling toothpaste that uses […]
SHARJAH // The bodies of Santosh Kumar, his wife and daughter were cremated in a quiet ceremony in Sharjah on Saturday attended by friends and family, nearly a month after they died at their home. Police had registered a case of suicide on July 15 after they found the bodies of the Indian film producer, his wife Manju Menon and nine-year-old daughter Gauri in their Dubai apartment. […]
U.S. Actions in Iraq Fueled Rise of a Rebel An image of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, taken from a video of a sermon he gave in July in Mosul. By TIM ARANGO and ERIC SCHMITT August 10, 2014 BAGHDAD — When American forces raided a home near Falluja during the turbulent 2004 offensive against the Iraqi Sunni insurgency, they got the hard-core militants they had been looking for. They also picked up […]
Ras Al Khaimah Ceramics, the world’s largest maker of ceramic tiles, plans to focus on core products and exit such businesses as construction, Chief Executive Officer Abdallah Massaad said. “We will continue to reduce our non-core businesses,” Massaad said in a phone interview. “Some we will shut down and others we will sell to concentrate on core businesses, which grew 22 percent in the U.A.E. in the […]
Mumbai: After witnessing decline in profit for six consecutive quarters, State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender, reported 3.3 per cent net profit growth to Rs 3,349 crore for the quarter ended June, compared to Rs 3,241 crore in the corresponding period of last year. Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, SBI, said: “Pressure (on asset quality) appears to be subsiding. But we need to see a pick-up in the economy to see appreciable changes in asset quality.” Net interest income grew 15 per cent to Rs 13,252 crore and fee income growth was 11 per cent to Rs 2,837 crore, though there was a fall in treasury income. The profitability got a boost of Rs 6,000 crore from sale of stressed assets to asset reconstruction companies (ARCs) during the q
NEW DELHI: Western Coalfields Ltd (WCL) has initiated the process of signing supply agreements with non-priority sector consumers such as paper and textiles units, even as power plants that had been given LoAs (letters of assurance) by the state-run company are facing shutdown in the absence of fuel.
Industry sources said WCL executives recently inspected sites of several prospective consumers from non-core sectors, including West Coast Paper Mills and Surya Laxmi Cotton Mills as a precursor to signing of fuel supply agreements.
The move by WCL, sources said, is in contradiction to the government’s recent emphasis on increasing coal supplies to power projects commissioned by March 2015.
Fo
NEW DELHI: State-run oil refiner-marketer Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd has drawn up plans to ramp up the capacity of its refinery at Numaligarh in Assam’s Golaghat district from three million tonnes per annum to nine million tonnes at an investment of Rs 16,600 crore.
The project includes laying a 1,350-km pipeline to bring in crude from a port on the east coast. While the refinery expansion would cost about Rs 8,800 crore, the remaining investment is expected to go into laying the pipeline and other assorted facilities.
Company sources said the project would mark the single-largest investment in Assam and boost economic activities in the north-east as well as unlock potential for exporting fuels to India&
MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank has relaxed norms for refinancing of infrastructure loans which banks want to be tagged as standard assets. From April 2015, the moment a loan is restructured, banks will have to classify them as bad loan. RBI had made an exception to the rule by allowing banks to classify infrastructure loans as standard assets if half of the outstanding loans are refinanced by a new set of lenders in the form of take-out financing. On Thursday, the central bank relaxed this norm by allowing standard tag if 25 per cent of the outstanding is met through take-out financing. Also, an infrastructure loan that is refinanced can be tagged as standard asset provided promoters are willing to invest more equity in the project. But the standard tag will be a
NEW DELHI: Germany is the global leader in energy efficiency while ageing power plants and inefficient ways of electricity generation and industrial practices put India at number 11 in the latest energy efficiency ranking of the world’s 16 largest economies.
The United States, having second highest per capita energy consumption in the world, comes at the 13th position — behind countries such as China, France, Japan, UK, Canada and Australia among others.
Besides the US, four other countries — South Korea, Russia, Brazil and Mexico — are below India in terms of indulging in inefficient ways of energy consumption.
Per-capital energy consumption of all these countries is, however, much
MUMBAI: As states governments add layers of taxes on fuel, disparity in petrol and diesel prices across the country has reached as high as 35%, spawning a new mafia that profits by sourcing cheap and selling high
Ever wondered why you have to shell more if you refill at a petrol pump in Thane, just a few kilometers away from your regular fuel station in Navi Mumbai. Or why the fuel costs less outside city limits.
Well, if you thought differential of a few bucks across suburbs was too high, here’s a shocker: it is way too high, as much as almost 35%, when compared among states, and is widening with every price increase.
This is because some state governments are adding multitude of taxes an
MUMBAI: The Adani Group and Indian Oil Corporation are in talks to build a Rs 30,000-crore joint venture refinery at Mundra, which would give Gautam Adani an entry into the oil sector while the state-run company would get land port facilities for the proposed export-focused unit.
The proposed 30-million-tonne refinery at Mundra will make Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s native state, Gujarat, a bigger energy hub. It already has refineries of Reliance Industries, Essar Oil and Indian Oil, apart from two LNG terminals and the country’s biggest city-gas distribution network.
Industry sources said Gautam Adani has held initial talks with top executives at IOC and offered around 3,500-4,000 acres of land for th
Qatar’s emir has issued a law providing for foreign investors to own up to 49 percent of listed Qatari companies, part of reforms to expand the stock market and develop the financial industry. “The law stipulates that non-Qatari investors are allowed to own no more than 49 percent of the shares of Qatari shareholding companies listed on Qatar Exchange,” the official Qatar News Agency (QNA) said on […]
A return to an era of higher interest rates could derail attempts by Islamic finance to create alternatives to a short-term funding instrument that has dominated the industry, but which some scholars and regulators want to see replaced. Islamic finance has been trying to diversify away from so-called commodity murabaha, a common cost-plus profit arrangement, in an attempt to reduce reliance on a single tool, stop money […]
By Kofi Bofah: Last June, BlackBerry (NASDAQ: BBRY) CEO John Chen first revealed the Passport phone at the company annual general meeting at Waterloo. Originally codenamed Windermere, the Passport is scheduled for official showing at a launch event in London this September. Already, the optimistic Chen has argued that the Passport will reclaim original BlackBerry customers lost to the iOS ecosystem. Going forward, however, the initial optimism […]
NEW DELHI: The central government’s worries on the Insurance Bill aggravated on Tuesday with Congress accusing it of adopting double standards on the issue and dismissing threats from the treasury benches that a joint session may be convened, forcing BJP ministers to knock on the doors of parties like SP and BSP to muster the numbers in the Rajya Sabha. Congress sources maintained the government was reportedly keen on passing the insurance bill in Parliament in this session so that Prime Minister Narendra Modi can showcase it to the US during his visit in September and hence wants to hurry through the process without sending it to a select committee of the Rajya Sabha. BJP leaders, on the other hand, alleged Congress was playing politics on
