Banking

Rabat / Reuters Moroccan lender BMCE Bank of Africa’s net profit rose 1 percent to 1.95 billion dirham ($201.76 million) in 2015 as strong growth in banking activities offset non-recurrent charges and higher bad loans. Consolidated net banking income rose 3 percent to 11.8 billion dirhams in the same period, it said in a statement on Monday. Banking income was ...

Amman / AP Jordan will get a cheap $100 million loan to help create 100,000 jobs for Syrian refugees and its own citizens, the World Bank president has announced. The long-term loan, almost interest free, is part of an attempt by the international community to improve conditions for refugees in overburdened regional host countries, including Jordan and Lebanon. More than ...

Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc dropped the most in a month as oil fell and Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) Banking Group Ltd. warned plunging resource prices had pushed up bad debts, renewing concern that the British lender may face more pain from its own commodity loans. ANZ, which has Australia’s biggest exposure to commodities, said provisions for bad debts would ...

Bloomberg Chiba Bank Ltd. is forming an alliance with Musashino Bank Ltd. in what could herald a new way for Japanese regional lenders to cope with industry headwinds without resorting to merging. The banks, based in prefectures that border with Tokyo, will acquire shares in each other, they said in statements. While the amount and timing are yet to be ...

LISBON / Reuters Santoro Finance, a holding company of Angolan investor Isabel dos Santos, is baffled by CaixaBank breaking off talks on a nearly ready deal for the Spanish bank to buy dos Santos’s stake in Portuguese lender BPI and hopes to resume negotiations soon. “It’s hard to understand what has happened after the sides have reached understanding on key ...

BOAO / Reuters China’s yuan will come under renewed downward pressure if the US dollar rises significantly in coming months, a policy adviser to the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) said. Huang Yiping, a professor at Peking University and a member of the central bank’s monetary policy committee, also said the central bank was managing the yuan against a basket ...

REUTERS The new governor of Bangladesh’s central bank has sent formal letters to the New York Reserve Fed, as well as central bank, and money laundering chiefs in the Philippines, asking them to help recover its stolen $81 million, a senior central bank official said on Sunday. The news came as Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith said the government ...

Bloomberg Banks’ latitude in assessing their biggest source of risk is set to be curtailed as global regulators try to prevent the financial industry from gaming capital requirements. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has proposed to remove the option for lenders to use their own models to determine how much capital they need to fund exposures to financial firms, ...

Boao / Reuters More than 30 countries are waiting to join the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), adding to its 57 founding members, its president said. The AIIB, first proposed by President Xi Jinping less than two years ago, has become one of China’s biggest foreign policy successes. Despite the opposition of Washington, almost many major US allies – ...

ANKARA / Reuters Turkey’s central bank should have cut interest rates more at this week’s policy meeting, an aide to President Tayyip Erdogan said, in a sign the central bank is likely to remain under pressure to lower the cost of borrowing. The bank kept its benchmark rate steady for the 13th straight month this week, but cut the upper ...