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Bloomberg The Japanese wireless unit of SoftBank Group Corp led a $19.5 million investment in Splyt Group Ltd, a UK-based startup that makes software to simplify ride-hailing abroad. With the latest round, Splyt has raised a total of $35 million, including an earlier investment by Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing giant Grab. SoftBank Corp declined to disclose the exact amount of its ...

Bloomberg KKR & Co expects to at least triple its investments in Vietnam in the next decade as it seeks to capture rising demand from the Southeast Asian nation’s growing middle class. The US buyout firm’s investments in Vietnamese assets crossed $1 billion after a KKR-led consortium bought a stake in Vinhomes JSC, the largest real estate developer in the ...

Bloomberg Kamet Capital Partners Pte is on a hiring spree as the Singapore family office tops $1 billion in assets for the wealthy clients it serves in Asia. Kamet has hired seven people since April, bringing total headcount to 25, CEO Kerry Goh said. Two more staff will be added by September, said Goh, whose firm runs money for four ...

Bloomberg Thailand’s tourism-revival strategy is to target big spenders seeking privacy and social distancing in the Covid-19 era, rather than try to attract a large number of visitors. The pandemic provides an opportunity to reset the sector, which had become reliant on Chinese groups and backpackers. Once the country’s borders are reopened and so-called travel bubbles are agreed upon, marketing ...

Bloomberg Germany’s economy is probably past the worst of the fallout from the coronavirus, Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview. “In the last few months we’ve had the sharpest economic deterioration in the history of the republic,” FAZ cited Weidmann as saying in an excerpt of the interview. “The good news is that the low ...

Bloomberg The Trump administration, following a backlash, said it would release details about companies that received loans of $150,000 or more from a coronavirus relief program for small businesses. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last week the firms that got billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded aid wouldn’t be disclosed, sparking fury from Democrats and others. In a joint statement, the ...

Bloomberg UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is mulling an emergency cut to the country’s Value-Added Tax (VAT), The Sunday Times reported. Sunak has asked officials to prepare various options to lower the sales tax, including reducing the headline rate and zero rating more products for a fixed term, the report said. He could make the announcement in a ...

Bloomberg There will be a European tax on giant digital corporations, even if a current project harbored by the OECD fails, European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said, in an interview with France Inter radio. “We’d rather do this within a global framework, as part of an OECD discussion, over the year 2020,” Breton said. He added that the US, ...

Bloomberg Daimler AG’s Chief Executive Officer Ola Kaellenius plans a new cost savings program and looks to cut an additional 10,000 jobs through 2025, magazine Automobilwoche reported citing unidentified company sources. The carmaker aims to outsource information technology services and cut positions in research and development, according to the magazine. The company previously announced in November a plan to reduce ...

Bloomberg The company once hyped as the future of German finance has become a symbol of national embarrassment. After promising to shake up the world of payments, Wirecard AG saw its stock collapse and its chief executive officer resign after $2.1 billion, or about a quarter of its balance sheet, went missing. That was a bombshell for Germany’s establishment after ...