Finanzas

El supervisor de mercado de valores admite que la situación «afecta a su imagen» mientras que el Banco de España se niega a hacer comentarios

Los ministros de Economía acuerdan las medidas de alivio de la deuda griega para facilitar su vuelta a los mercados

Atenas recuperará su autonomía el 20 de agosto con una deuda del 178% del PIB, ¿no es esto una patada hacia adelante?

Desde 2010, fecha del primer rescate, los griegos han perdido el 40% de sus ingresos. Los jubilados son un buen ejemplo

La cadena hotelera da entrada en su consejo a representantes de la firma tailandesa que quiere comprar la mayoría de títulos

UNTIL recently the Abraaj Group, a private-equity firm based in Dubai, was riding high. It was one of just a few such firms focused on emerging markets, and a darling of “impact investors”, who seek social or environmental returns, not just financial ones. Assets under management of $13.6bn made it the largest private-equity firm in the Middle East, and the 42nd-largest globally in 2017. Its Pakistani founder and boss, Arif Naqvi, a regular at Davos and a patron of the arts, had won awards for philanthropy. It is all the more surprising, then, that basic corporate-governance missteps led his firm to file for provisional liquidation on June 14th.

The problems began in late 2017 when four investors in its $1bn health-care fund, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the private-sector arm of the World Bank, grew worried. Nearly $280m of $545m they had been asked for was not promptly spent on acquisitions, as is standard in the industry. Abraaj blamed delays in the…Continue reading

The serried ranks

FOR now, at least, when speaking of the trade dispute with America, China’s government is taking a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone. That helps explain the Chinese public’s surprisingly measured views of Donald Trump, and gives the Chinese government some breathing room to consider its options.

The state media have so far taken the high ground. True, the Global Times, a chest-thumping tabloid, accused the American president of “gambling” that China will be cowed by his “capricious and obstinate attitude”. No country can isolate itself from globalisation, said the Xinhua news agency: “The wise man builds bridges, the fool builds walls.” A new Xinhua web page popped up on June 20th, tracking multilateral deals that Mr Trump has quit, including on trade, climate change and Iranian nuclear arms.

But China has yet to debate, publicly, how to handle an American president who is an avowed populist…Continue reading

THE shipping industry has encountered rough seas over the past decade. Between 1985 and 2007 trade volumes shot up at around twice the rate of global GDP but since 2012 their rate of growth has barely kept pace, leaving the industry with overcapacity. Freight rates for containers have plunged by a third since 2008. Worse may be to come. The industry does not regard as good news President Donald Trump’s announcement on June 15th of tariffs of 25% on up to $50bn of Chinese goods, which will slow trade growth further. Now a veritable hurricane of new environmental laws is about to hit.

Shipping accounts for only around 2% of global carbon emissions, but is quite dirty. Burning heavy fuel oil, the industry produces 13% of the world’s sulphur emissions and 15% of its nitrogen oxides. And by 2050 ships will be producing 17% of all carbon emissions if left unregulated, according to research by the European Union.

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the…Continue reading

From Station F to Milano Centrale

“CHOOSE truth. Choose Iliad,” entreats the voice-over of a television advertisement after images of President Donald Trump speechifying and footballers feigning injuries flash across the screen. That may seem pretentious for a mobile provider, but the advert is part of Iliad’s entry into Italy, which began on May 29th. The group, led by one of France’s most prominent businessmen, Xavier Niel (pictured), is credited with having shaken up the telecoms industry at home. He wants to have a similar impact in Italy.

Mr Niel started out with a porn-chat service for Minitel, a French antecedent to the internet. In 2002 he launched his Freebox, which combined cheap web access, TV and fixed-line telephony, and in 2012 started selling low-cost mobile telephony. Growth came easily for years, allowing Mr Niel to spend time on other things, such as launching Station F, the world’s largest startup incubator, in Paris, and free coding schools in…Continue reading

AMONG Africa’s many foreign fixers and mining tycoons, few are more colourful than Dan Gertler, an Israeli diamond trader. Just over 20 years ago at the age of 23 he took a punt on Laurent Kabila, the rebel who in 1997 had just seized the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) from Mobutu Sese Seko, its dictator for the previous 32 years. Having met him through his son, Joseph, he lent the president $20m to buy weapons. He could have lost everything, but instead made it back a hundredfold. By the time Joseph Kabila took over from his father, after the latter’s murder in 2001, he had become the man largely in charge of distributing Congo’s mining licences to international mining companies.

Two decades on, Mr Gertler’s clout in Congo is undiminished. That was proved on June 15th when Glencore, the world’s largest commodities trader, decided it would rather evade sanctions than not pay the billionaire the royalties he was owed from a Glencore-owned mine. The American government…Continue reading