London / Reuters Sterling climbed on Tuesday as European investors returned to work from the Easter break, up around 0.6 percent on a trade-weighted basis since the market close last Thursday, as nerves over a possible British exit from the EU quietened somewhat. The pound had hit a two-year low last week against the Bank of England’s trade-weighted basket of ...

Paris / AFP A decision by PSA Peugeot Citroen to double its chairman’s salary to five million euros has sparked angry debate in France, with Finance Minister Michel Sapin on Tuesday qualifying the raise as “harmful”. Carlos Tavares, the chairman of Europe’s second biggest carmaker, earned €5.24 million ($5.8 million) in 2015, up from 2.75 million in 2014, company documents ...

Bloomberg You know you have an issue with tax collection when the person tasked with boosting it is fired for fraud. But where some see a problem, others spot opportunity, and governments in eastern Europe have identified unpaid taxes as a means of swelling their coffers. Romania, whose tax chief was dispatched last month over alleged misallocation of European Union ...

Frankfurt / Reuters As the European Central Bank moves into an unfamiliar world of negative interest rates and incentives to encourage banks to make loans to businesses and consumers, a north-south divide is opening up between euro zone lenders. In the north, anaemic demand for loans and a financial system already flush with cash mean banks see mostly costs. They ...

SINGAPORE/ reuters The U.S. economy remains on track for a gradual path of interest rate hikes and fears over the impact of a slowing global economy and bouts of financial volatility are overdone, San Francisco Federal Reserve President John Williams said on Tuesday. “Others’ economic fates do not spell our own,” Williams said in a speech at the National University ...

Bloomberg Cemex SAB is staging its biggest rally in four years as the largest cement maker in the Americas gets a boost from cost cuts, U.S. sales gains and a rebound in the Mexican peso. Lower interest rates and taxes also will help the company boost free cash flow by $350 million this year, more than the previously targeted increase ...

Bloomberg Newspapers have settled on a strategy to stop withering away: feast on each other for survival. For the owners of big-city dailies like the Chicago Tribune and Denver Post, buying smaller publications and slashing costs has become a way to buy time while figuring out how to make more money online. That was the logic behind the recent failed ...

Bloomberg Chile’s long-heralded economic recovery is on hold once again, at least for the rest of this year, the central bank said, cutting its growth and inflation forecasts for 2016. The world’s largest copper producer will expand 1.25 percent to 2.25 percent this year, policy makers said in their quarterly monetary policy report on Monday. The previous estimate was 2 ...

Bloomberg Rioprevidencia, the pension fund for public-sector workers from Rio de Janeiro state, is holding informal talks with holders of its $3.1 billion in bonds after a waiver for breached debt-covenants expired. Rioprevidencia, which is grappling with a 10 billion-real ($2.8 billion) budget hole this year, isn’t currently considering a full restructuring of its dollar-denominated debt and hasn’t hired any ...

Emirates Business The number of internet users in the Arab World is expected to rise to about 226 million by 2018, according to the Arab Knowledge Economy report 2015 – 2016. The Internet penetration rate will jump from about 37.5 per cent in 2014 to over 55 per cent in 2018, or about 7 per cent above the estimated world ...