Reuters Anbang Insurance Group Co’s unexpected withdrawal this week of its $14 billion offer to buy Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc is a wider blow to the unprecedented drive by Chinese companies to acquire North American and European assets. Fresh disclosures by Starwood on Friday showed how Anbang’s hard-charging Chairman Wu Xiaohui backed out of the deal even after ...

Shanghai / AFP China Construction Bank (CCB), the country’s second-largest lender, reported flat growth in net profit in 2015, as bad loans jumped with economic growth slowing. The bank’s net profit edged up 0.14 percent year-on-year to 228.15 billion yuan ($35 billion) in last year, slowing from a 6.1 percent annual increase in 2014, according to a statement that was ...

WARSAW / Reuters Poland’s Alior Bank has agreed to buy Bank BPH from General Electric for 1.225 billion zloty ($329 million) and said it will look to make another acquisition this year after moving into the country’s top 10. Shares in the lender, which has a market capitalisation of 4.67 billion zlotys, jumped by up to 5.7 percent, with investors ...

Bloomberg Banco Santander SA intends to close about 450 branches in Spain this year, more than one in 10, as the lender steers customers into digital banking to cut costs and bolster profitability. “Spain’s financial sector is facing a period of major change,” Country Head Rami Aboukhair told employees in an internal memo announcing the closures. “The current economic context, ...

Nicosia / AFP Bank of Cyprus, the bailed-out eurozone country’s largest lender, has announced plans to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange and to delist from the Athens market. The move reflects the bank’s ambitions of raising its “visibility and share liquidity” on a major European exchange, BoC said in a statement. The announcement came on the same ...

BLOOMBERG BNP Paribas SA and UniCredit SpA are closest to running into regulatory restraints on making payouts on securities, including their riskiest bonds, among the European banks followed by analysts at CreditSights Inc. If BNP were to run up losses that consumed capital amounting to 1.05 percent of assets weighted by risk, that would crimp the Paris-based lender’s ability to ...

Los Angeles / Reuters Volvo’s North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker’s semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show. “It can’t find the lane markings!” Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. “You need to paint the bloody roads here!” Shoddy infrastructure ...

Washington / AP Americans are flooding back into the job market at the fastest pace since before the Great Recession, encouraged by steady hiring and some signs of higher pay. The flow has halted, at least temporarily, one of the economy’s more discouraging trends: the sharp decline in the percentage of people either working or looking for work. That figure ...

Bloomberg In its 40 years of existence, Apple, which is celebrating its anniversary this week, has revolutionised the history of the personal computer by widening the public’s access to computing and excelling at innovation. Here’s a selection of 10 iconic Apple computers. 1976: the Apple I. This was the very first computer put on sale by the Californian company. Less ...

Emirates Business BAE Systems unveiled some of the biggest threats to businesses by profiling six prominent types of cybercriminals, exposing how they cause harm to companies around the globe, and providing some practical ways that companies can defend against them. Threat intelligence experts at BAE Systems have revealed ‘The Unusual Suspects’, built on research that demonstrates the motivations and methods ...