Bloomberg Oil traded near the lowest close in a week as U.S. crude stockpiles unexpectedly increased, keeping supplies at the highest in at least three decades with the peak summer demand period approaching its end. Futures were little changed in New York after falling 2.8 percent on Wednesday. Inventories rose by 2.5 million barrels last week, according to the ...

Riga /AFP Two Scandinavian banks, Nordea and DNB, announced on Thursday they will merge operations in Baltic eurozone members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Their new bank will be the second-largest financial institution in the region behind market-leader Swedbank, with assets worth 13 billion euros ($14.6 billion) and more than 3,000 employees. “Nordea and DNB have entered into an agreement to ...

  Bloomberg Shares of Kenya’s biggest banks plunged after President Uhuru Kenyatta signed a law that caps the interest rates lenders can charge on loans and set minimum payments on deposits. KCB Group Ltd., the nation’s largest bank by assets, led the slump to head for the steepest decline in 13 years after Kenyatta signed the law saying he sympathized ...

  Bloomberg Malayan Banking Bhd. posted a third straight decline in quarterly profit as the biggest Malaysian lender more than tripled allowances for loan impairments. Net income fell to 1.16 billion ringgit ($288 million) in the three months through June from 1.58 billion ringgit a year earlier, the Kuala Lumpur-based company said in a stock exchange filing on Thursday. Revenue ...

  Lisbon /AFP The European Commission and Portugal said they have agreed on a 5-billion-euro deal to recapitalise the state-owned Caixa Geral de Depositos (CGD) bank, including through a 2.7-billion-euro injection of state funds. The deal was provisionally approved by European Union competition chief Margrethe Vestager to meet the 28-nation bloc’s tough rules on preventing unfair government aid for businesses. ...

  Bloomberg China’s central bank watchers have something new to puzzle over. The People’s Bank of China sold 50 billion yuan ($7.5 billion) of 14-day reverse-repurchase agreements on Wednesday, its first offering of anything with a tenor other than seven days since February. Officials are signaling they’re ready to curb leverage in the bond market by making it less profitable ...

  AFP Russia’s largest lender Sberbank on Thursday announced it almost tripled its profits in the second quarter and predicted further stabilisation of the economy this year despite credit growth slowing. The majority state-controlled bank made a net profit of 145.4 billion rubles ($2.23 billion, 1.98 billion euros) in the second quarter, up 166.3 percent on the same period last ...

  Sydney / AFP Australian supermarket giant Woolworths on Thursday reported a large annual net loss of Aus$1.23 billion (US$940 million), its first since listing more than two decades ago, following a failed push into hardware and a slump in food sales. Woolworths, Australia’s largest retailer and one of the two dominant supermarket chains in the country, recorded the sharp ...

  Bloomberg Deutsche Lufthansa AG flight attendants approved a three-year contract to end one of the airline’s long-running disputes over pay and pensions that have led to strikes. The accord with the cabin-crew union UFO will lead to savings in the mid-double-digit millions of euros in labor costs and reduce pension commitments by a high triple-digit million-euro amount, Lufthansa said ...

  Emirates Business ANA Holdings Inc., the world’s biggest operator of Boeing Co.’s Dreamliner jet, will halt some services using the 787 saying it found an issue with the plane’s engines. Japan’s biggest airline will stop some services starting on Friday, Wataru Yoshioka, a spokesman for the Tokyo-based company said on Thursday. The airline’s fleet of 50 787s are all ...