Banking and finance professionals in the Middle East plan to seek new jobs this year after bonuses failed to meet expectations, according to eFinancialCareers. Almost 60 percent of the region’s financial services employees plan to change position, with 45 percent saying they were disappointed with their bonus, eFinancial said in an e-mailed report. Bonuses rose for half of Middle East finance professionals, compared with 49 percent in […]
|Andy Greenberg| Just as antivirus researchers congratulated Apple for keeping the iPhone free of nasty apps five full years after its release, spammers seem to have finally tarnished that spotless record. Antivirus researchers at Kaspersky say they’ve spotted an app known as “Find and Call” in both the iPhone App Store and Google’s Play market that secretly uploads all of a user’s contacts to a remote server and then sends […]
Dubai’s main airport attracted 2 million more passengers than London Heathrow in the first quarter, with only work on the Gulf hub’s runways likely to stop it becoming the busiest international crossroads this year. Dubai International, home base to Emirates, already the top airline by cross-border traffic, handled 18.4 million travelers in the period, beating Heathrow in each of the three months as the runway-restricted London hub […]
Gold premiums in India, the world’s second biggest consumer after China, jumped to their highest level in more than two-and-a-half months due to short supplies amid firm demand ahead of the second-biggest gold buying festival. Premiums for gold bars rose more than 23 percent to $110 an ounce on London prices, a level last seen in early February, compared with $89 an ounce earlier in the week. […]
Forbes Media LLC’s effort to find a buyer is running into trouble, with one potential bidder officially out of the running and two others no longer in active talks, people with knowledge of the matter said. Germany’s Axel Springer SE, which publishes the Russian edition of the magazine, isn’t involved in any process to acquire Forbes, Edda Fels, a spokeswoman, said yesterday. The company had been interested […]
Asian shares rose in early trade on Wednesday after Wall Street reversed a three-day losing streak, but Japanese stocks dropped sharply after the yen surged on fading hopes of near-term stimulus from the Bank of Japan. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan advanced 0.9 percent, taking heart from a recovery in U.S. stocks overnight. Japanese stocks, on the other hand, had a tough day on […]
Swiss and British regulators stepped up their scrutiny of alleged manipulation of foreign exchange markets on Monday, as watchdogs take a closer look at whether banks have a tight enough grip on the behavior of their traders. Switzerland’s competition commission WEKO said it opened an investigation into several Swiss, British and U.S. banks over potential collusion to manipulate currency rates. The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), meanwhile, […]
SpiceJet Ltd., the Indian budget carrier headed for its third straight annual loss, said it sees little chance of luring investment soon amid elevated debt and intensifying competition. Although the airline’s owners have injected more than 5 billion rupees ($83 million) in equity in recent quarters, that “has not been adequate” to reduce the carrier’s dependence on debt, S.L. Narayanan, the chief financial officer of SpiceJet’s parent […]
UBS AG suspended foreign-exchange traders in the U.S., Singapore and Switzerland as its investigation into the alleged rigging of currency markets widened, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. They include Onur Sert, an emerging markets spot trader based in New York, and at least three more worldwide, said the person, who asked not to be identified because of the probe. Sert and Dominik von […]
| By Clyde Russel | The price of Middle East crude oils being supplied to Asia appears too high given an increase in supply from Iran, Iraq and rival Russia and muted demand from refiners. While benchmark Oman futures have declined 5 percent since the start of the year to end at $102.93 a barrel on Wednesday, the price relative to global marker Brent has been rising. […]
Dubai is considering regulatory reforms to persuade more funds to base themselves in its financial centre, though industry experts believe that other parts of its investment environment may also need to change for the emirate to compete globally. The proposed rules would create a new class of funds in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) in an effort to attract asset managers, such as hedge funds and […]
|By TAP Staff| A Global Financial Centres Index compiled by London-based consultancy Z/Yen using assessments of financial services professionals has come up with a most astonishing finding: Dubai comes three points behind Qatar. According to the index, Qatar, Dubai and Riyadh took places 26, 29 and 31 respectively, but continued to rise in the index, while 23 of the 27 European centres declined in rank. New York […]
The world’s most-profitable banks have never been so unloved by stock investors. China’s four-biggest lenders, which reported $126 billion of earnings in the 12 months through September, sank to the lowest valuations on record in Hong Kong trading yesterday. The MSCI China Financials Index dropped to an almost decade low versus the global industry benchmark while the market value of Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., […]
Saudi Arabia’s drive to make Qatar abandon its embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood may founder because of the limited leverage the Saudis and their allies can exercise over the world’s richest country. Qatar traded more with Singapore in 2012 than it did with the three Gulf neighbors — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain — that withdrew their ambassadors from Doha last week to protest […]
Singapore’s shrinking brokerage industry is set to get even smaller as trading restrictions planned by regulators dent profits, according to a body that represents individual brokers. The average daily value of shares traded in the city, which slumped 40 percent in the first two months of 2014 from a year earlier, will decline further should rules be implemented that include requiring collateral for some trades and shortening […]
|By TAP Staff| Bank of Baroda, which identifies itself as India’s international bank on the strength of its global operations, is set to celebrate the milestone of a Ten Trillion Bank, taking it into a unique league of banks with turnover of ten trillion rupees or more. The largest Indian bank, after the State Bank of India, is the only bank in the UAE with a full-fledged […]
Indian politicians are expected to spend around $5 billion on campaigning for elections next month – a sum second only to the most expensive U.S. presidential campaign of all time – in a splurge that could give India’s floundering economy a temporary boost. India’s campaign spend, which can include cash stuffed in envelopes as well as multi-million-dollar ad campaigns, has been estimated at 300 billion rupees by […]
Emirates airline said its alliance with Australia’s Qantas was working and had helped the Gulf carrier to improve yields, after some analysts questioned the benefits of the partnership. Qantas is reducing its workforce by 15 percent, slashing spending and selling gas-guzzling older planes after stiff competition at home and overseas pushed the Australian flag carrier deep into the red in the first half. The loss in Qantas’s […]
United Arab Emirates telecommunications firm du has borrowed $1.17 billion in three separate deals to refinance existing debt and fund equipment purchases, the company said on Tuesday. The deals include a $720 million package reported by Reuters last month and agreements with Standard Chartered Bank and DBS Singapore to refinance and top up existing loans. “The move lowers the company’s funding costs, saving approximately $9 million over […]
Singapore leapt five spots to top a global ranking of the most expensive cities as a stronger currency and price increases made it costlier to live in the island nation, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. The republic beat Paris, Oslo, Zurich and Sydney, while Tokyo moved down to sixth position from first previously after the yen slid, the EIU’s latest Worldwide Cost of Living Survey released […]
Gold gained more than 1 percent on Monday on escalating geopolitical tensions as Ukraine mobilised for war after Russia bloodlessly seized Crimea, an isolated Black Sea peninsula where Moscow has a naval base. The Group of Seven major industrialised nations condemned Russia’s intrusion into Ukraine and cancelled preparations for the G8 summit, that includes Russia, scheduled for Sochi in June, the White House said. Cash and U.S. […]
China’s credit-market gauges are triggering alarm bells, as banks grow cautious in lending to each other while investors prefer the safest government bonds. The spread between the two-year sovereign yield and the similar-maturity interest-rate swap, a gauge of financial stress, reached 121 basis points on Feb. 19, the widest in Bloomberg data going back to 2007. Two days later, the cost to lock in the three-month Shanghai […]
A last official link between the Gulf’s colonial era and its commercially dynamic present, Bill Duff devoted his life to Dubai and played a bigger part than any other westerner in the early transformation of the emirate from obscure outpost into global hub. Duff, who has died aged 91, arrived as an economic adviser in 1959 in what were called the Trucial states. His mission came at […]
China’s yuan surpassed the Swiss franc to become the seventh most-used world payments currency in January, global transaction services organization SWIFT said on Thursday. With a market share of 1.39 percent, the yuan remained one of the top 10 most-used currencies for payments worldwide for the third consecutive month. It ranked eighth in December. Yuan payments increased by 30.6 percent while the growth for all payment currencies […]
