Bloomberg Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is setting up a $2 billion joint venture with billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s internet services firm Mail.ru Group Ltd. to strengthen the Chinese company’s foothold in Russian e-commerce. Asia’s most valuable company signed an accord with Mail.ru to merge their online marketplaces in the nation of more than 140 million people. The deal is backed by ...

Bloomberg A Chinese consortium including Hillhouse Capital is planning to drop its pursuit of a takeover of Yum China Holdings Inc., the $14 billion operator of KFC restaurants in the world’s most populous nation, people with knowledge of the matter said. The investor group, which also included KKR & Co. and China’s sovereign wealth fund, has decided not to continue ...

Bloomberg Singapore, one of the world’s easiest places to do business, is making it simpler for investment managers to register funds locally as the city-state goes after a bigger slice of the $69 trillion global asset-management industry. While many asset managers have offices in Singapore, most of their funds are still registered in offshore jurisdictions. A new corporate structure bill ...

Bloomberg Thailand expects to select a consortium by January to build a 225 billion baht ($6.9 billion) high-speed rail link connecting three international airports, one of the largest transport projects in its history. The agency overseeing the plan, the Eastern Economic Corridor Office, aims to make as much progress on the project as possible ahead of elections due from February ...

Bloomberg Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin pledged to bolster ties as Moscow stages its biggest military exercises since the height of the Cold War with Chinese participation. Both face pressure from the administration of US President Donald Trump. “We have a relationship of trust in the sphere of politics, security and defense,” Putin told Xi ...

Bloomberg German Chancellor Angela Merkel can’t seem to escape the political fallout from her open-borders refugee policy. Unresolved tension over migration in her government may come to a head again this week in a clash between the chancellor and her domestic intelligence chief, who defied Merkel by suggesting that a video of far-right unrest in eastern Germany that she described ...

Bloomberg The White House delivered a whipsaw message to North Korea, announcing it’s ready to start planning a second meeting with Kim Jong-un just hours after President Donald Trump’s top national security adviser said nuclear talks were stalled. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that Trump had received “a very warm, very positive letter” from Kim seeking a follow-up ...

Bloomberg Sweden’s political establishment contained a nationalist surge. Now it may need to throw away the old rules to form a viable government. Both of Sweden’s traditional blocs, one led by the Social Democrats and one by the conservative Moderates, claimed victory after Sunday’s election that’s still too close to call. The nationalist Sweden Democrats surged to about 17.6 percent, ...

Bloomberg European lawmakers will make final arguments on whether Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s “illiberal” government should be subject to the European Union’s strictest sanctions for threatening democracy and the rule-of-law in the world’s largest trading bloc. The 751-member European Parliament has never before voted to trigger Article 7 of the EU treaty against a member state, which could ultimately ...

Bloomberg Bank of Montreal (BOM)’s chief executive officer says he doesn’t need to make another acquisition to meaningfully lift earnings from the US. “If we continue doing the things that we’re doing organically, I could see a third of the bank coming from US earnings,” Chief Executive Officer Darryl White, 47, said. “To get beyond that you’d have to resume ...