DUBAI / Reuters Al Rajhi Bank, Saudi Arabia’s second-biggest bank by assets, aims to take advantage of opportunities arising from the country’s economic diversification plan to boost its share of corporate lending, its CEO said. Al Rajhi, Saudi Arabia’s biggest Islamic lender, is one of the dominant players in the kingdom’s consumer banking market, but has only around a ...

  Bloomberg DBS Group Holdings Ltd. chief executive officer signaled that the Singaporean bank may be past the worst of its problems from loans to troubled oil and gas-services companies. While the sector is “still challenged,” the formation of new nonperforming assets and bad-loan charges for the industry are expected to be “significantly lower this year,” Piyush Gupta told reporters ...

  Washington / DPA He may have been all alone on the Red Planet at Christmas but NASA’s robotic Curiosity rover said he didn’t “feel lonely.” At the beginning of the year, he wished everyone a “HappyNewYear from Mars!” And though he had a small problem with his drill just before the holidays, he was quick to reassure his Twitter ...

  Muenster / DPA The hulking grey war machine resembles a ship’s upturned hull, with one stumpy barrel protruding above the Iron Cross insignia. It’s a far cry from the Tiger and Panther tanks that ravaged WWII battlefields, but a sombre testimony to the start of a terrifying new chapter in modern warfare. The first German tank, the A7V, was ...

  Bloomberg Automakers enjoying lucrative sales of trucks and sport utility vehicles are hoping President Donald Trump makes good on his vows to deregulate. Environmental groups are saying fuel efficiency standards won’t be watered down without a legal challenge. “We’ll see him in court,” Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, said of the group’s planned response if the ...

  Bloomberg Some of Britain’s biggest companies are bucking calls to reveal more data about executive pay, risking a fresh rift with major investors who are urging the government to combat ballooning wage inequality. Four of the 16 FTSE 100 companies that responded to a Bloomberg survey — GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Aviva and Anglo American — said they won’t publish a ...

  Bloomberg Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. plans to invest more than $1.2 billion in Canada’s subarctic in the next three years as it builds one new mine and expands another. North America’s fourth-largest gold miner by market value is moving ahead with plans to develop its Meliadine project and a deposit near its Meadowbank mine in Nunavut, the company said ...

  Bloomberg Builders started work on more US homes than forecast in January after an upward revision to starts in the prior month, a sign construction was on a steady path entering 2017. Residential starts totaled an annualized 1.25 million, easing from a 1.28 million pace in the prior month, a Commerce Department report showed. The median forecast of economists ...

  Bloomberg Ignore those million-plus empty new homes scattered across Spain, a developer owned by Lone Star Funds says there’s never been a better time to build more. Neinor Homes, bought in 2014 by the Dallas-based investor, aims to become one of Spain’s biggest homebuilders by increasing construction in big cities where the housing stock is running low, according to ...

  Bloomberg OPEC could extend its oil supply-reduction pact with non-members or even apply deeper cuts from July if global crude inventories fail to drop to a targeted level, OPEC sources said. The group, together with Russia and other non-OPEC oil producers, agreed late last year to cut output by 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) to reduce a price-sapping ...