News

Dubai / Emirates Business The 11th annual World Takaful Conference (WTC) will be convened by leading financial intelligence platform, Middle East Global Advisors, in strategic partnership with the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). DIFC is the financial hub for the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, providing a world-class platform connecting the region’s markets with the economies of Europe, Asia ...

Abu Dhabi / WAM Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, has installed 50 percent of the solar home systems as part of an innovative project to provide power in rural Morocco. The installation of 9,000 out of 17,670 systems across 940 villages comes only a year after the partnership agreement was signed between Masdar and Morocco’s Office National de l’Electricite ...

Dubai / Emirates Business Reflecting its ongoing commitment to introducing customer-centric financial solutions and unique banking experiences, Mashreq launches the UAE’s first Happiness Account. Available to customers transferring their salary, the Mashreq Happiness Account offers up to AED 2,500 guaranteed cash in the account as soon as the first salary is transferred. Then there is a free AED 25 worth ...

Abu Dhabi / WAM The UAE has successfully vaccinated over 10.6 million children against polio as part of phase-3 of the Project to Assist Pakistan, UAE PAP. UAE PAP has announced the results of the vaccination campaign for the month of March, which successfully administered 10,668,987 doses of the polio vaccination to children under five including in the provinces of ...

Bloomberg The U.K. economy may have grown at the slowest pace in more than three years in the first quarter, according to new estimates that could put a further cloud over the outlook. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research estimated on Friday that gross domestic product rose 0.3 percent, half the pace recorded in the last three months ...

Bloomberg The U.K. Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal investigation after Tata Steel Ltd. identified a lapse in procedures at its Speciality Steels business through an internal audit in 2015, the company said in an exchange filing on Saturday. “Certain inappropriate testing and certification procedures at the South Yorkshire-based Speciality Steels business were identified” in the audit, the company said. ...

Bloomberg The first full week of the European Central Bank’s expanded bond buying highlighted the program’s limitations in the face of heightened political risks in the euro area. The extra yield, or spread, that investors get for holding Spain’s 10-year bonds instead of similar-maturity German securities widened to the most in two months. That was even as the ECB increased ...

Bloomberg German towns and cities plagued by car and truck pollution will soon get the legal tools they need to ban older diesel vehicles from streets where emissions are highest. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government will remove the legal uncertainty that has made town mayors and councils hesitate to ban older diesels from their streets, said Deputy Environment Minister Jochen Flasbarth, ...

Bloomberg Italy will fail to reduce its debt load this year as much as previously targeted due to lower than expected economic growth. The debt ratio, the euro region’s second-highest, will slip to 132.4 percent of gross domestic product this year from 132.7 percent in 2015, Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan told reporters in Rome after the cabinet met to ...

Poland / AP Hundreds of thousands of people whose personal fates hinge on whether Britain leaves the European Union or stays don’t even have a say in the matter: Polish immigrants, a community so numerous that Polish has become Britain’s second most-spoken language. When Poland and many other countries once behind the Iron Curtain joined the EU 12 years ago, ...