Bloomberg US airports may be just as vulnerable as London’s Gatwick airport to the kind of illegal drone incursions that shut down the UK’s second-busiest hub last week. Counter-drone technology performed so poorly in US government tests in recent years that the systems couldn’t reliably identify rogue unmanned aircraft, casting doubts on whether there’s a viable short-term solution to the …

ABU DHABI / WAM The assets of UAE conventional banks (CB) amounted to around AED2.275 trillion, accounting for 79.7 percent of total banking assets by the end of November 2018, with Sharia-compliant banks accounting for 20.3 percent of total banking assets, according to statistics released on Monday by the Central Bank of UAE. The total assets of CB increased by …

CAIRO / WAM The United Arab Emirates is participating in the 32nd meeting of the Unified Arab Customs Law Committee, which began at the Arab League headquarters, under the chairmanship of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The UAE delegation was headed by Ali Rashid Al-Dhanhani, Director of the Legal Affairs Department of the Federal Customs Authority, and included Ibrahim Al …

Bloomberg National Commercial Bank (NCB), Saudi Arabia’s biggest lender, started initial talks with Riyad Bank for a merger — a deal that would create the Gulf’s third-biggest lender with $182 billion in assets. Talks may not result in a transaction, National Commercial Bank said in a statement. The lender said it has coordinated the move with the central bank and …

Bloomberg China announced another round of tariff cuts, lowering import taxes on more than 700 goods from January 1 as part of its efforts to open up the economy and lower costs for domestic consumers. There will also be cuts to some export tariffs, and temporary import tariff rates will be as low as zero for some goods, the Ministry …

Bloomberg An Italian construction company just sold its lease to develop a wind farm in waters off the New Jersey coast for $215 million, about 21,000 percent more than it paid only three years ago. Toto Holding SpA’s US Wind unit, which paid about $1 million for the lease off Atlantic City in 2015, resold it to Electricite de France …

Bloomberg Kenya needs about $85 million annually in the short term for green projects in agriculture, transport and manufacturing, and as much as $888 million annually during the follow- ing five to 10 years, according to a banking industry lobby. The financing is needed to counter the effects of rapid climate change that could erase about 2 percent of economic …

Bloomberg Suncor Energy Inc is working with Alberta’s government to help mitigate the “unintended consequences” of mandated oil cuts, a policy company opposed from the start and now says is hitting it disproportionately hard. Suncor said its initial required output curtailment is higher than the 8.7 percent industrywide level, without giving specific amount. That makes it harder to maintain safe …

Bloomberg Three of Europe’s largest power suppliers will need to draw up new strategies after the collapse of a deal to merge the retail units of SSE Plc and Innogy SE operating in the UK. Combining the two would have been an ambitious task. The outlook darkened with laws limiting the bills consumers pay for electricity and natural gas, leaving …

Bloomberg China’s biggest-ever overseas property buying spree reversed course in dramatic fashion in 2018. But even after the record unwinding, many lucrative real estate assets remain in Chinese hands. They include the 245 Park Ave skyscraper in Manhattan, New York’s famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel and Chicago’s Vista Tower, under construction but envisaged as one of the city’s tallest buildings. With …