Indian agents have raided the home of the country’s former finance minister as part of an investigation into alleged violations of strict foreign investment rules. India’s Central Bureau of Investigation said it had visited locations in the southern city of Chennai on Tuesday morning, including the home of Karti Chidambaram, which he shares with his father P Chidambaram, a Congress party politician whose most recent cabinet post […]
Vodafone redials its Indian impairment numbers. FT Opening Quote, with commentary by Matthew Vincent, is your early Square Mile briefing. You can sign up for the full newsletter here. Hailing from the country that gave India cricket, Victorian railway architecture and a penchant for bureaucracy, Vodafone might have expected a little goodwill on the subcontinent. Instead, India has given the British mobile phone operator a price war, […]
By Colin Packham | SYDNEY SYDNEY Papua New Guinea’s decision to relocate hundreds of men held in an Australian-run detention centre to a nearby town soon exposes them to violence and inadequate medical care, asylum seekers and human rights groups said on Tuesday. Papua New Guinea immigration officials told asylum seekers on Monday that an area of the controversial Manus Island camp north of the PNG mainland […]
By Ami Miyazaki and Taiga Uranaka | TOKYO TOKYO Japan’s government said on Tuesday it wanted Toshiba Corp (6502.T) and partner Western Digital Corp (WDC.O) to cooperate, expressing concern about an escalating dispute between the two that threatens to upend the sale of Toshiba’s chip unit. Western Digital sought international arbitration this week to stop Toshiba from selling the unit without its consent, arguing that the Japanese […]
Halfway through what would be a nine-minute bidding war for a patinated bronze female head by Constantin Brancusi, paddle 281 shot above a standing-room-only crowd at Christie’s in midtown Manhattan. The slow, steady auction for the ovoid sculpture of a sleeping woman’s face turned aggressive when, minutes in, Tobias Meyer, the former chief auctioneer for Sotheby’s, entered a $34m bid with a phone clutched to his ear. […]
By Dustin Volz and Jim Finkle | WASHINGTON/TORONTO WASHINGTON/TORONTO Cyber security researchers have found technical evidence they said could link North Korea with the global WannaCry “ransomware” cyber attack that has infected more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries since Friday. Symantec (SYMC.O) and Kaspersky Lab said on Monday that some code in an earlier version of the WannaCry software had also appeared in programs used by […]
Chinese networking giant Huawei has announced that it will be leading the “digital transformation” of Hamad International Airport in Qatar in an effort to improve security, customer experience, and efficiency. Huawei, which announced entering a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Doha-based airport this week, said it will work on creating prototypes and solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous machines throughout the airport. “The objective […]
The blockbuster listing of Ant Financial, the payments affiliate of Alibaba, has been put on ice until the end of next year at the earliest, according to bankers. Market players have been counting on Ant, which runs China’s popular Alipay mobile payments service, to be the star in this year’s initial public offerings calendar. It was valued at $60bn in its last financing round in April 2016, […]
There is much going against South Korea right now, including an anaemic economy, a series of failures in the country’s shipbuilding sector, Chinese boycotts and North Korean belligerence. And yet the country’s stock market keeps hitting records. The Kospi, the Korea’s main equities benchmark, set a record high last week and is up 13 per cent in the year to date, making it one of Asia’s best-performing major markets of 2017. […]
Food trends often centre around a single ingredient or innovative cooking technique. However, it seems the latest global food craze is not so much about the food but how it is served. Food bowls have grown in popularity in the United States and United Kingdom, and are now rolling into many of the UAE’s trendiest restaurants and cafes. Over the past five years, data collected by Technomic […]
Companies hoping to go public are often accused of over-promising would-be investors — especially those that listed in and around the dotcom bubble — but the pledge of one that listed 20 years ago on Monday seems almost positively euphemistic. “Amazon.com intends to use technology to deliver an outstanding service offering and to achieve the significant economies inherent in the online store model,” the company said in […]
DUBAI // Couples should look beyond a fertility clinic’s success rate before signing up for an in-vitro fertilisation scheme, and avoid cut-price deals, doctors warned. Couples would “get what they pay for” and should prepare for a significant financial commitment if they want the IVF treatment to be successful, said doctors at a Dubai Health Authority event marking International Family Day. Couples who conceived children through treatments […]
Criminal hacking groups have repurposed a second classified cyber weapon stolen from US spies and have made it available on the so-called dark web after the success of the WannaCry attack that swept across the globe on Friday. The hacking tool, developed by the US National Security Agency and codenamed EsteemAudit, has been adapted and is now available for criminal use, according to security analysts. As with […]
Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Co. plans to invest as much as $15 billion in SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund and start two new venture capital funds to build its technology holdings. The SoftBank fund will be “wrapped up” in two to three weeks with about $95 billion of commitments, according to Ibrahim Ajami, head of venture capital at Mubadala Capital, the sovereign wealth fund’s investment arm. Mubadala plans to […]
Puerto Rico’s once-influential Government Development Bank has won agreement from some of its creditors to cut its debt burden and restructure its obligations. The organisation, which for years acted as the territory’s primary fiscal agent and evolved into a lender of last resort in times of distress, will transfer its assets into a new entity and issue new bonds in a deal that will see creditors take […]
Hours before Germany formally declared war on France in WWI, Marcel Proust penned a letter to his financial advisor that anticipated the horrors to come. “In the terrible days we are going through, you have other things to do besides writing letters and bothering with my petty interests, which I assure you seem wholly unimportant when I think that millions of men are going to be massacred […]
From the founding fathers through John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, American politicians have indulged in extramarital affairs with slaves, movie stars, sisters-in-law and interns. But, in large part because of the press, the American public still reacts to political sex scandals as if they were completely unheard of. Americans remain shocked by these events, I believe, in large part because our perception has been shaped more […]
By Conor Humphries | DUBLIN DUBLIN JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N) has agreed to buy a Dublin building with room for 1,000 staff in the first sign of a financial services company expanding significantly in Ireland since the government began a major campaign to attract firms in the wake of Brexit. The U.S. investment bank will acquire a 130,000 square foot (12,000 square meter) building at the Capital Dock […]
Lattice Data Apple has acquired Lattice Data, a data mining company which could give Apple a stronger talent pool in the artificial intelligence and analytics fields. Over the weekend, TechCrunch reported that Lattice Data, born out of the statistical inference Stanford research project DeepDive in 2015, had been quietly purchased by Apple. The company’s mission is to “unlock the value in dark data for critical real-world problems,” […]
By Henning Gloystein | SINGAPORE SINGAPORE Oil prices jumped 1.5 percent on Monday after the energy ministers of the world’s two biggest producers Saudi Arabia and Russia jointly said that a crude production cut would be extended from the middle of this year until March 2018. Brent crude was at $51.58 per barrel at 0621 GMT, up 74 cents, or 1.46 percent, from its last close and […]
A report from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has revealed that only 53 percent of people it surveyed were able to nominate an organisation to report the misuse of their information to. The OAIC said that when asked, only 47 percent admitted awareness of a Privacy Commissioner — either federal or state level — but a mere 7 percent said they would report misuse […]
15 May 2017 The legal departments at Pepsi-Cola International, Total Marketing Middle East and Qatar Financial Centre Authority were among the big winners at the Middle East Legal Awards, which took place at The Ritz-Carlton, Dubai, on Thursday (11 May). The trio were named Legal Department of the Year in the large team, small team and government, department, agency or public body categories respectively. The award for […]
SYDNEY U.S. buyout firm TPG Capital Management on Monday raised its cash bid for Fairfax Media Ltd (FXJ.AX), offering A$2.76 billion ($2.04 billion) for the struggling Australian publisher and sending its shares to a six-year high. The fresh offer from TPG [TPG.UL] and partner Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (OTPP) would allow shareholders to cash out completely rather than leaving them with scrip in a piecemeal collection […]
Cairo, May14th – 2017 Emirates NBD Egypt is pleased to announce that it has participated in an EGP 1.8 billion syndicated loan deal in favor of the state-owned petroleum company; Egyptian National Gas Holding Company (EGAS) to help significantly boost gas production in Egypt. Emirates NBD Egypt’s contribution amounted to EGP 220 million in the five year syndicated deal. With Banque du Caire as the Initial Mandated […]
