News

  Sharjah / Emirates Business Al Yousuf Motors LLC, the authorised dealers of YAMAHA products ranging from motorcycles to boats to personal water crafts, has announced that it is sponsoring Champion water vehicle racer Ali Mohamed Yousef Al Lanjawi of the UAE for all his future competitions and challenges. As part of the sponsorship engagement, Al Yousuf Motors, YAMAHA will ...

  Beijing / Bloomberg Mitsubishi Motors Corp. admitted to manipulating test data involving 625,000 vehicles in order to improve fuel-economy claims. The affected models include those supplied to Nissan Motor Co., which discovered the manipulation, according to a statement by Mitsubishi Motors. The two companies are discussing compensation and Mitsubishi is also checking whether the cheating affected overseas models. Mitsubishi ...

  Sydney / AFP Australia on Wednesday boosted funding to the corporate regulator by Aus$127.2 million (US$99 million) and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate financial crime, in sweeping reforms prompted by public outrage over numerous bank scandals. The nation’s major banks — which regularly rake in multi-billion-dollar profits — have been under scrutiny following a series of consumer fraud ...

  TOKYO / AP Japan’s exports fell for a sixth straight month in March, sapped by weak shipments of machinery and chemicals, though a sharper decline in imports helped push the trade surplus to its highest level in more than five years. Customs data reported on Wednesday showed exports fell 6.8 percent from a year earlier to 6.46 trillion yen ...

  Islamabad / Bloomberg Pakistan is vowing to get tough on tax evaders who have so far shunned an amnesty program set to finally expire on April 30 after four deadline extensions. Less than 0.3 percent of Pakistan’s 3 million goods traders have participated in the programme, well below the 17 percent forecast by the government when it began in ...

  New Delhi / AFP About 330 million people are suffering from drought in India, the government has said, as the country reels from severe water shortages and desperately poor farmers suffer crop losses. One of the government’s most senior lawyers PS Narasimha told the Supreme Court that a quarter of the country’s population, spread across 10 states, have been ...

  Karachi / AFP Pakistan’s Habib Bank Limited announced it had received a licence to open a branch in China, a move that would make it the first South Asian lender to operate in the world’s number two economy. More commonly known by its acronym ‘HBL’, the bank said it would open a branch in Urumqi, the largest city in ...

  SHENZHEN / AP The Chinese automaker that sold more electric cars last year than Tesla, Nissan or GM is taking a back road into the American market on a battery-powered bus. Detouring around the cost and risk of consumer sales, BYD Co. has quietly built a U.S. business supplying rechargeable buses to environmentally-minded transit agencies. Its factory north of ...

  Bloomberg U.K. unemployment rose for the first time in seven months and employers added far fewer jobs than forecast, suggesting the labor market is cooling. The number of people looking for work climbed by 21,000 to 1.7 million in the three months through February, the Office for National Statistics in London said on Wednesday. That left the jobless rate ...

  Bloomberg A plan to expand a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany is driving a wedge into the European Union, with some eastern members feeling their needs are being overlooked by the richer and more energy-diversified west, the bloc’s top energy official said. The €10-billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline isn’t aligned with the principles of the bloc’s laws ...