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Bloomberg Crude extended gains from the highest close in two weeks as speculation mounted over potential output disruptions in a region that’s home to Iraq’s oldest producing oil fields. Futures in London rose as much as 1.7% after adding 2.8% last week. Iraqi soldiers seized facilities including a refinery after mobilizing to take fields near the northern city of Kirkuk ...

Bloomberg Saudi Arabia may cut energy subsidies more gradually and take longer to balance its budget, Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan said, as the kingdom seeks to soften the impact of its drive to repair public finances. The prices of some subsidized domestic energy products will rise to international levels later than previously envisaged, Al-Jadaan said in an interview in Washington. ...

Bloomberg It’s been a bad year for oil explorers in Norway’s Arctic: a record campaign in the Barents Sea yielded little; the most exciting well in years proved to be a flop; and Norwegians grew increasingly skeptical about the industry that made them rich. But companies led by Norway’s state-controlled Statoil ASA and Sweden’s Lundin Petroleum AB aren’t about to ...

Bloomberg Indonesia is on track to become a trillion-dollar economy and should be the envy of Southeast Asia. Yet on some key measures, the region’s biggest economy is falling behind. The nation lags neighbours on infrastructure development, faces a fiscal shortfall that’s heaping pressure on the state budget and still has 28 million people living in poverty. That’s even after ...

Bloomberg Li Ka-Shing’s CK Asset Holdings Ltd. sold its 75 percent holding in The Center to a Chinese-led group for $5.15 billion, a record for a Hong Kong office tower, the Hong Kong Economic Journal reported. The deal will be announced in the near future, the Economic Journal reported, without saying where it got the information. Some domestic investors are ...

Bloomberg A decade after Chinese dairy companies were roiled by a scandal that poisoned thousands of children, investors are seeing the biggest players as safe bets. Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group Co. and China Mengniu Dairy Co. have soared to all-time highs as the companies hunt aggressively to build up their milk supply chains through foreign acquisition. Also underpinning the ...

Bloomberg Until early this month, Indian jewellers expected the traditional surge in gold demand from the Hindu Festival of Diwali to be muted. The industry was struggling to cope with a slump in sales caused by a government crackdown on the black market, and efforts to increase financial transparency. In August, jewelers were dealt a fresh blow by a decision ...

Bloomberg The death toll from a truck-bomb blast in Somalia’s capital climbed to more than 200 people, as the African Union urged greater international backing for the government’s fight against extremists. The explosion, the nation’s deadliest single attack, killed at least 231 people and injured 275 others, the Associated Press reported, citing Senator Abshir Abdi Ahmed. The blast occurred on ...

SHARJAH / WAM The Sharjah Islamic Bank (SIB), posted a net profit of AED360 million for the nine months of 2017 compared to AED335.8mn for the same period last year, a 7.2% increase. Total assets reached AED37.8bn at the end of Q3 of 2017, compared to AED33.5bn at the end of 2016. Liquid assets hit AED 8.2bn or 21.6% of ...

Bloomberg Artificial intelligence (AI) could add $837 billion to UK economy by 2035, a government-commissioned report said. The economic boost would come from a combination of more personalized services, improvements in health care and adopting machine learning to find ways to use resources more efficiently, according to the report. “The UK could stay among the world leaders in AI in ...