Bloomberg Blackstone Group LP’s quest to be the first company to build back-up power plants in southern Germany faltered after the European Commission queried whether the nation needs the facilities at all. The world’s biggest private equity firm’s PQ Energy unit says an EU antitrust probe could delay a bid to build new reserve power plants in Germany’s industrial ...

  Bloomberg Oil’s recovery is helping ease the pain of shrinking output by China’s biggest energy producers. PetroChina Co., the country’s largest producer, reported first quarter earnings swung to a profit thanks to the surge in prices, even as total output fell 6.3% from a year ago. China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., the refining giant known as Sinopec, saw net ...

  Bloomberg Wind may have just gotten a boost in the biggest US electricity market. New rules requiring power producers to ensure supplies are available all year round are giving some an incentive to use more wind. The first test will come at next month’s auction by PJM Interconnection LLC — the grid operator covering the region from Chicago to ...

  Bloomberg Ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing raised more than $5.5 billion from investors, scoring the largest round of funding ever for a technology company to bankroll an expansion beyond China and into driver-less technology. Didi, which drove Uber Technologies Inc. out of China last year, is already one of the country’s best-funded private companies: its backers range from powerful state ...

  Bloomberg Nintendo Co.’s shares jumped as much as 2.9 percent in Tokyo, reversing losses, as investors bet that the company’s lower-than-anticipated operating profit forecast will be raised when more people buy games for the new Switch hybrid console. Operating profit for the fiscal year through March 2018 will be $584 million, the Kyoto-based company said, which was short of ...

  Bloomberg President Donald Trump won a court ruling making it easier for him to rescind the Clean Power Plan, his predecessor’s program for weaning American power producers off of coal and other fossil fuels. The US Court of Appeals in Washington put a 26-state lawsuit challenging the plan on hold for 60 days without deciding whether the initiative is ...

  Bloomberg The Spanish economy showed signs of renewed momentum in the first quarter with growth accelerating faster than expected. Output grew 0.8 percent in the three months through March, the National Statistics Office said in a preliminary report. That compares with 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter and beats the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists predicting ...

  Bloomberg IBM’s compensation plan for top executives drew record shareholder opposition after the board boosted Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty’s pay package over 60 percent last year. About 46 percent of the votes cast at the April 25 annual meeting in Tampa, Florida, went against the board’s pay plan for top bosses, according to a regulatory filing. That’s IBM’s ...

  Bloomberg Anthem Inc. failed to overturn a court ruling that blocked its planned takeover of rival Cigna Corp., capping a nearly two-year battle to complete a combination of two of the biggest health insurers in the US. The federal appeals panel in Washington upheld a lower court ruling by a 2-1 vote. The court rejected Anthem’s key argument, that ...

  Bloomberg Novo Nordisk A/S has agreed to settle a US probe of its marketing of diabetes drugs that allegedly included disguising salespeople as medical educators and paying kickbacks to persuade doctors to prescribe its medicines. The allegations were disclosed when a whistle-blower lawsuit was unsealed by a judge. The US Justice Department investigation, which began in 2011, focused on ...