Regional News

Bloomberg Savola Group, Saudi Arabia’s largest food products company, is in talks to buy sweets and confectionery maker Sanabel Al-Salam in a deal worth $300mn, sources said. Savola, which owns supermarket chain Panda, is keen to increase the quality and variety of its sweets offering, said the sources, who declined to be named as the matter was not public. Talks ...

Reuters Bahrain-listed Investcorp aims to invest in companies that support oil giant Saudi Aramco and is also eyeing healthcare and education assets being sold in Saudi Arabia’s privatisation drive, its executive chairman said. The private equity and alternative asset firm, which has offices around the world, aims to more than double investments to $50 billion in five years by expanding ...

Bloomberg A push to use more natural gas by the world’s fastest-growing oil guzzler is getting a boost from an unlikely source: the nation’s gasoline and diesel makers. India’s top three state-owned oil refiners are planning to use their gasoline and diesel fuel outlets to sell compressed natural gas for vehicles, increase investments in city-gas distribution projects and expand use ...

KHOBAR / Reuters Saudi Arabia and Russia plan to set up a $1 billion fund to invest in energy projects, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said in a interview broadcast by Al Arabiya TV on Monday. The fund, to be finalised during this week’s visit by Saudi King Salman to Moscow, was part of efforts by two of the world’s ...

Bloomberg Kuwaiti officials are considering an annual public spending cap of 21 billion dinars ($69.5 billion) on average over the next three fiscal years to help the government plan future debt sales, a senior official said. The cap is being included in a proposed budget for the fiscal year starting in April, the official said, asking not to be named ...

Bloomberg China’s independent refiners burst onto the international oil market scene only a couple of years ago and lifted the nation past the US as the world’s No. 1 crude buyer. Now, a new generation of firms building some of the globe’s biggest plants are threatening to eclipse them. The original set of private processors, known as teapots, is clustered ...

BENGHAZI / Reuters Libya’s giant Sharara oil field has been closed since late on Sunday, shutting off the production of more than 230,000 barrels per day (bpd), an engineer at the field and a Libyan oil source said. Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) said in a statement on Monday that it was “working towards a swift restart of production. At ...

Reuters Qatar’s economic growth slowed in the second quarter to its lowest rate since the global financial crisis because of a sagging oil sector, and sanctions by Arab states, reports said. Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, expanded just 0.6 percent from a year earlier in the April-June period, the slowest growth since the 2009-2010 crisis. GDP grew 0.5 percent ...

Meed Saudi Arabia’s lifting of the ban on women driving could lead to an increase in its demand for gasoline, according to energy consultants First Global Energy (FGE). Saudi Arabia is the biggest consumer of gasoline in the region and is the world’s nine largest gasoline market. Current demand is around 580,000 barrels a day (b/d) – a figure that ...

Emirates Business Intertek, a leading Total Quality Assurance provider to industries worldwide, certified Saudi Aramco Total Refining and Petrochemical Company (SATORP), an oil and petrochemical joint venture refinery between Saudi Aramco and TOTAL, as being compliant with the standard requirements of ISO 14001:2015 Environmental Management Systems Certification. This globally-recognised standard was developed by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and ...