Bloomberg Accor SA plans to buy back as much as 1.35 billion euros ($1.65 billion) of shares over the next two years after the hotel operator agreed to sell a majority stake in its property business. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Singapore’s GIC Pte sovereign-wealth fund, Credit Agricole Assurances, Amundi SA, Colony NorthStar Inc. and other investors joined forces to ...

Bloomberg Sigfox’s co-founder is eyeing a listing in 2019 and pondering a pre-IPO round later this year, after reassuring investors about the future of the French startup. With money from backers including Salesforce.com Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., Sigfox has expanded its network for connected objects, added sizable customers and is on track to become profitable in the fourth quarter, ...

Bloomberg Puerto Rico faces a “dangerous financial dilemma” because of the US Treasury Department’s delay in providing billions of dollars of disaster relief needed to help it recover from the wreckage caused by Hurricane Maria, the island’s governor said in a letter to Senate and House leaders. Treasury’s “misguided delay and policy decisions contrary to Congressional intent” for the community ...

Bloomberg As Washington and Seoul try to maintain a unified front against North Korea, the case of two cargo ships shows how Kim Jong Un’s regime keeps finding ways to evade increasingly tough international sanctions aimed at halting its nuclear weapons program. Both vessels have gone through repeated changes of names and owners, part of an international shell game that ...

WASHINGTON / Reuters A senior US general accused Russia of playing a destabilising role in Syria and acting as “both arsonist and firefighter,” as a brief truce unilaterally declared by Moscow in the eastern Ghouta region collapsed. The United States and Russia have been on different sides of the seven-year-old war, with Moscow heavily backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad whose ...

Bloomberg Among the enduring curiosities of Donald Trump’s presidential run was his announcement that campaign chairman Paul Manafort was an unpaid volunteer. Why would a longtime political fixer do that? That question has grown more persistent thanks to successive indictments of Manafort by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, each documenting in finer detail Manafort’s allegedly fraudulent scramble for cash just ...

Bloomberg Afghan President Ashraf Ghani presented his most comprehensive peace plan to the Taliban in a bid to bring them to the negotiating table and end the nation’s near 17-year war. Ghani said he would recognize the Taliban as a political group and would initiate talks if they agreed to a cease-fire, he told delegates at a peace conference in ...

Bloomberg The Democratic Republic of Congo reacted angrily to Botswana’s claim that President Joseph Kabila’s decision to remain in power is stoking instability in the vast central African nation. Congo’s communications minister dismissed as “nonsense” the comments from Botswana, which represented the most strident criticism yet of Kabila by an African government. It comes as militia violence flares in Congo’s ...

The question of whether to prioritize jobs or economic efficiency is always difficult. Nowhere is this more of a dilemma than in the construction industry. In a world of rapid technological disruption, construction is a rock of solidity to which many blue-collar workers can cling. The industry still employs about 7 million workers in the US. The job doesn’t change ...

Riots, drought, social instability: Emerging markets are never easy. Now investors face a potentially bigger test—they must decide whether President Xi Jinping’s determination to remain in power in China is a risk-on or risk-off moment for the whole asset class. The Communist Party is set to repeal presidential term limits this month in a step that would allow the 64-year-old ...