Bloomberg Buyout firm Abraaj Group is leading a group of investors planning to bid for a minority stake in Barclays Plc’s African unit, according to people familiar with the matter. Abraaj is working with financial advisers and is in discussions to team up with other investors, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information is private. ...

  DUBAI / Reuters The subscription period for National Bank of Kuwait’s proposed capital increase will commence on Wednesday, the Gulf state’s largest commercial lender said in a bourse statement. The rights issue will be worth around 137.6 million dinars ($473.2 million) according to Reuters calculations. The subscription period will close on June 16, the bourse statement from the lender ...

  DUBAI / Reuters India has approached Turkey’s Halkbank to faciliate the payment of $6.5 billion to Iran, which it owes for crude oil imports, Iran’s Fars news agency quoted India’s ambassador to Tehran as saying on Saturday. “The Indian government is seeking to pay the $6.5 billion debt and is looking to prepare the banking activities. The receiving bank ...

  Bloomberg Emirates Islamic Bank PJSC, Dubai’s second-biggest Shariah-compliant lender, has mandated banks including HSBC Holdings Plc for the sale of Islamic bonds, according to two people familiar with the issue. The sale of the dollar-denominated, benchmark-sized securities may begin as early as this week, said the people, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Standard Chartered ...

  Bloomberg China’s central bank reassured investors that monetary policy will continue to support the economy after a sharp slowdown in new credit last month, and said the lending slump was temporary. The deceleration in the growth of new yuan loans in April was mainly due to a pick-up in a program to swap high-cost local government debt for cheaper ...

  Bloomberg Mark Carney defended the Bank of England against political critics furious at his warnings about the dangers posed by a European Union exit, and described the British economy as facing similar uncertainty to the early 1990s. “We’re taking a judgment as a committee, and we’re changing policy because of it, we’re putting out billions of pounds of liquidity ...

  LONDON / AP Ex-London Mayor Boris Johnson has compared the European Union’s aims to those of Adolf Hitler, arguing that the 28-nation bloc is creating a superstate that mirrors the attempt of the Nazi leader to dominate the European continent. Johnson, the most prominent political figure arguing that Britain should leave the EU, says the past 2,000 years of ...

  Rome / AFP Italy’s health minister is proposing doubling a ‘baby bonus’ incentive for couples to have more children to combat what she calls a catastrophic decline in the country’s birth rate. “If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births a year in 10 years’ time, 40 ...

  Athens / AFP Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that Greece will return to the bond markets in 2017, seven years after losing access to the markets due to its debt crisis. “We will return to the markets in 2017,” Tsipras said in an interview with the Realnews weekly newspaper. While the eurozone country has continued to raise funds through short-term, ...

  Frankfurt / AFP The European Central Bank has become too powerful, but largely because politicians have foisted an increasingly political role onto it, one of the German government’s key economic advisors said in a newspaper interview on Sunday. “The ECB has gained enormous power, even though it is not answerable to any parliamentary control. I take a critical view ...