News

Bloomberg The Trump administration’s decision to keep issuing oil drilling permits during the government shutdown is putting those authorisations in legal jeopardy, environmentalists argued in a filing. The Bureau of Land Management has already violated a federal spending law and legal requirements for public consultation by issuing at least 153 drilling permits since the shutdown began on December 22, WildEarth ...

Bloomberg Five US refiners either significantly reduced or totally replaced purchases of Venezuelan crude in 2018, and more may follow suit as president Donald Trump mulls new sanctions against the South American nation. Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Phillips 66 haven’t processed Venezuelan crude in their US refineries since the US imposed financial sanctions against the country and its oil ...

Bloomberg Satorp, the joint venture between Saudi Aramco and Total SA, hired Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp (SMBC) and Riyad Bank to help raise funds to develop a petrochemical facility in the kingdom, according to people with knowledge of matter. Financing for the $5 billion Amiral project is expected to be arranged from banks and export credit agencies, the people said, ...

SHARJAH / WAM Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansouri, Minister of Economy, stated that the ties between both the UAE and Kosovo are historically strong, which extend ba-ck to time of UAE’s Founding Father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. He remarked that these ties grew into an integrated economic partnership, which resulted in ground-breaking agreements on the avoidance ...

Dubai / WAM The Middle East, North Africa and South Asia (Menasa) region’s e-commerce sector is growing aggressively at 24.6 percent CAGR through to 2020, according to a newly launched report by Dubai CommerCity. The report, ‘Menasa e-commerce landscape’, assists global companies and start-ups in evaluating the opportunities within the regional e-commerce market and highlights the high growth in the ...

Bloomberg Opec and its allies plan to hold a meeting in March to assess their oil-production accord in Azerbaijan, and then ministers will gather to set policy in April, according to the organisation’s top official. The body that reviews the implementation of Opec’s supply cuts, the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, will convene in the Azeri capital of Baku on March ...

Bloomberg India will not share the limited supply of Iranian crude allowed under a US waiver from sanctions with private refiners, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That is a departure from the earlier practice of splitting exempted volumes. The government has asked four state refiners led by Indian Oil to share the entire 9 million barrels of ...

Abu Dhabi / WAM Abu Dhabi Transmission and Despatch Company (Transco), an ent- ity of the Department of Energy, Abu Dhabi, on Tuesday signed an agr-eement with the ISLE Group to be the first official member of the Technology Approval Group (TAG) in the UAE. TAG, launched in the UK 15 years ago, is a forum that brings together water ...

DUBAI / Emirates Business Consumer confidence in the UAE rebounded in the fourth quarter of 2018, as residents absorbed the impact of VAT and high expenses incurred over the summer. That’s according to the consumer confidence tracker Q4 2018 from yallacompare, the Middle East’s leading comparison site for financial products. During the fourth quarter of 2018, the tracker polled more ...

Bloomberg Oil rose amid estimates of another decline in US crude inventories and signs that China is stepping up efforts to combat an economic slowdown. Futures in New York climbed as much as 3 percent after sinking during the past two sessions. American stockpiles probably fell for the sixth time in seven weeks, according to a Bloomberg survey of analysts ...