Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid last year referred to Israeli expats in Berlin as willing to throw Israel “in the garbage” for a cheaper cost of living. Bloomberg News Back in 2011, rising dairy prices sparked a cottage cheese protest in Israel. Now there’s a pudding protest. The first campaign, which called for a consumer boycott of dairy goods, eventually helped bring hundreds of thousands of middle […]
By S. Sethuraman The world economy is yet to make a full exit of the 2008 financial crisis and its recessionary aftermath, so that growth prospects for 2014, the sixth year, have had to be revised down, with the disappointing and uneven recovery, mainly among advanced nations. And geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, with limited impact so far, may hold greater risks […]
|TAP Special| The oil market scene is turning murky, with indications of a price war developing among major producers to defend their market shares. Crude futures tumbled to a 17-month low on signs that global supply is outstripping demand and by all indications, crude oil is poised to extend the biggest slump in more than two years. To make things worse, Saudi Arabia is said to be […]
A Luxembourg court on Friday rejected a request by two holding companies of Portugal’s Espirito Santo family for “controlled management”, a sort of bankruptcy protection from creditors. Espirito Santo Financial Group (ESFG) and its subsidiary Espirito Santo Financiere SA still have the right to appeal, and the court has yet to decide on two other holding companies controlled by the family. ESFG is Banco Espirito Santo’s largest shareholder, and […]
Virtual Piggy, a payments technology company and the provider of youth payment technologyOink, has partnered with Funcom. The agreement with the independent developer and publisher of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, is to bring control to in-game payments. Oink is a payment technology designed to allow retailers and game publishers to reach under 21 consumers in a legal manner compliant with the FTC and other international regulations. The […]
Slide Show | Preparing for New Risks in Golan Heights The fighting in Syria has prompted residents of the Golan Heights, Israel’s quietest frontier, to reassess the potential danger. By JODI RUDOREN October 4, 2014 EIN ZIVAN, Golan Heights — The updates poured in by two-way radio and cellphone as Tomer Lahav’s pickup sped around this kibbutz near Israel’s cease-fire line with Syria one recent evening. Mortars were falling […]
German engineering has an outstanding reputation worldwide for quality, technological innovation and reliability, yet in the obsession for perfection, it can miss market opportunities. The German watch industry, for example, with its hundreds of companies, has for long had a fixation for mechanical perfection, but in the process neglected the design aspect and the very quartz technology it had developed on its own. Similarly, Siemens had a […]
SAUDI ARABIA. Jadwa Investment, the Saudi asset manager focused on Sharia’ah compliant mutual and private equity funds, has just issued its Quarterly Global Oil Market Update (Q3 2014). Summary of the report · The combination of accelerating US supply, weaker than expected global demand, stabilization in geopolitics, and an appreciation of the dollar, led to oil prices dropping by 7.3 percent in Q3 2014, to an average of […]
The planned merger of the United Arab Emirates’ two main stock exchanges, home to the second-best performing share gauge in the world, will take more time to complete, according to a Dubai government official. “It’s still on the table,” Mohammed Al Shaibani, chief executive officer of Investment Corp. of Dubai, the emirate’s main state-owned holding company, said in an interview today at a Dubai conference. “We were […]
|By TAP Staff| The Dubai International Financial Centre Court appointed Philip Bowers and Neville Kahn of advisory firm Deloitte as joint provisional liquidators of Portuguese financial group Espirito Santo’s Dubai subsidiary ES Bankers (Dubai) Ltd (ESBD. This came after the regulator was informed ESBD was “no longer able to meet its obligations and continue as a going concern”, the statement added. The DIFC action is the latest […]
Dubai bourse… marked recovery in economy boosts IPOs Dubai bourse ‘may see further listings by year-end’ DUBAI, 1 days ago The Dubai Financial Market could see one more company list on the stock exchange before the end of the year in addition to the already-announced share sale by a healthcare and education start-up, its chairman said on Thursday. Initial public offerings in the emirate dried up in […]
Emaar Malls Group jumps 20pc on listing DUBAI, 1 days ago Shares in Dubai’s Emaar Malls Group (EMG) jumped in early trade on Thursday as the stock started trading on Dubai’s main stock exchange and drained liquidity from the rest of the emirate’s market. EMG shares, which were sold at Dh2.90 in the heavily oversubscribed $1.6 billion initial public offer, rose 13.8 per cent to Dh3.30 after […]
A trading screen on the floor of Dubai Financial Market shows the bid and offer levels for Emaar Malls Group shares. Asa Fitch for The Wall Street Journal Shares of Emaar Malls Group started trading on the Dubai Financial Market on Thursday, marking the first significant new share sale in Dubai since the global financial crisis. Emaar Malls isn’t a big deal globally. But traders here say […]
|By K Raveendran| The run-away success of Alibaba’s blockbuster IPO is seen inspiring other online players to take similar routes. Among the probable candidates is leading online trading and investment entity Saxo Bank. “The IPO is one of the options the management has under consideration,” Jakob Beck Thomsen, CEO of Saxo Bank Dubai, told The Arabian Post. But he refused to commit himself on a specific time […]
Nicolas Parasie for The Wall Street Journal In the past six months, the United Arab Emirates’ official credit bureau has ramped up its efforts to procure information: it collected two years of financial records for every single retail customer of each financial institution in the country. That process involved digesting some 100 million transactions, half of which are now fully uploaded into the bureau’s data vault. Marwan […]
Gulf banks are feeling the pinch of rapidly shrinking corporate loan margins, with some predicting a bounce in lending rates as soon as the first half of 2015 as the escalating price war bites into profitability. Lenders are being forced to cut rates and loosen lending terms to secure business as local banks, flush with cash as their balance sheets recover from the global financial crisis, seek […]
Dubai’s Emirates Airline, the world’s largest carrier by international traffic flown, has signed a deal with TAAG Angola Airlines to manage the carrier for 10 years and cooperate on “commercial opportunities” in Africa. The Gulf carrier, which also has a partnership agreement with Australia’s Qantas Airways, will code-share on cargo and passenger services, participate in each carrier’s frequent flier programs and coordinate ground handling, Emirates said in […]
|By TAP Staff| Following the huge success of Emaar’s malls IPO, Chairman Mohammed Alabbar indicated the possibility of floating the group’s hotel business, which includes the signature Armani Hotel. Meraas Holding, a Dubai government-controlled developer, has picked banks to manage the IPO of its theme park unit, three people with knowledge of the matter said earlier this month. The company’s IPO is planned for the fourth quarter, […]
Qatar… construction activity jumps 14.5 per cent Qatar’s economic growth edges up to 5.7pc in Q2 DUBAI, 4 hours, 21 minutes ago Qatar’s economic growth picked up slightly to 5.7 per cent on an annual basis in the second quarter of this year as robust non-oil activity outweighed a decline in the hydrocarbon sector, official data showed on Tuesday. Real gross domestic product growth accelerated from a […]
By S. Sethuraman The Reserve Bank of India’s Fourth Bi-Monthly Monetary Policy Statement on September 30 does not offer any hint of monetary easing in the near future, again citing risks to lowering at present the policy lending repo rate from 8 per cent it has maintained since April, in the current fiscal year. This leaves all other policy rates and reserve ratios unchanged, (reverse […]
Participants at a microfinance conference in Dubai this week. Sanabel Microfinance has blossomed in recent years, helping fill a funding need for businesses too tiny and risky for traditional banks. Curiously perhaps, while microfinance has been a big hit across parts of Asia and South America, its start in the Middle East and North Africa hasn’t been as auspicious. Microfinance institutions have existed in the Middle East […]
|By TAP Staff| Emaar Malls Group, the shopping mall operator based in Dubai, said Monday that it had raised $1.6 billion in its initial public offering. Emaar Malls, which owns the Dubai Mall, one of the largest shopping centers in the world, with 3.7 million square feet in leasable space and 75 million visitors last year, is being spun off from Emaar Properties, the property giant that […]
A landmark ruling by the court system in Dubai’s financial free zone suggests the emirate is starting to influence the way international business disputes are resolved in the Middle East, partly taking over that role from London and New York. Last month a court in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) found Switzerland’s Bank Sarasin had mis-sold $200 million of investment products to Kuwait’s prominent Khorafi family, […]
The Dubai Mall … a key property of Emaar’s malls unit. Emaar malls unit IPO priced at top of range DUBAI, 12 hours, 27 minutes ago Dubai’s Emaar Properties confirmed on Monday that the initial sale of shares in its malls unit priced at the top of the proposed range amid massive demand from investors, making it the largest stock offer in a Gulf Arab economy since […]
