Emirates Business According to EY’s latest Growth Drivers report ‘Strength in unity’, if the GCC were to become one single market instead of six separate ones today, it would be the ninth largest economy in the world today – similar in size to Canada and Russia and not far from India. If it is able to keep growing at an ...

Emirates Business According to a new study by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the banking industry in the GCC grew at a lower rate in 2015 than it did in 2014 with just a 7.2 percent increase, stemming almost exclusively from major customer segments such as retail and corporate banking. Based on the banks’ 2015 annual results released in the ...

Emirates Business Drake & Scull International PJSC (DSI) — a regional market leader in the integrated design, engineering and construction disciplines of General Contracting, Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing (MEP), Water and Power, Rail, and Oil and Gas, and Water and Wastewater Treatment — has announced that the Fujita Corporation has awarded Drake & Scull Rail (DSR) a QR 340 Million ...

Bloomberg The US and Russia set an August deadline for a deal to end Syria’s five-year war as they agreed to try to push forward negotiations between the government and opposition that remain deadlocked over the fate of Russian ally President Bashar Al Assad. “We will accelerate the effort to try and move the political process forward,” US Secretary of ...

Baghdad / AFP United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon arrived in Baghdad on Saturday for talks with senior officials on ways of assisting war-ravaged Iraq, the world body said. Ban, who had last visited the Iraqi capital in March 2015, was travelling with World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim and Islamic Development Bank head Ahmad Al Madani. They went straight ...

Iskandariyah / AFP The village of Al Asriya, south of Baghdad, prepared on Saturday to bury its sons, killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up after a football tournament. The attacker, who himself looks like a teenager on a photo distributed by the IS group that claimed the attack, cut through the crowd when trophies were being presented. “There ...

Palmyra / AFP Syrian troops backed by Russian ground and air forces on Saturday pushed deeper into the IS group stronghold of Palmyra, as Washington considered boosting its anti-extremist fight in neighbouring Iraq. IS, behind a string of attacks in the West including this week’s Brussels bombings, is under growing pressure from Syrian and Iraqi military offensives to retake two ...

Athens / afp Greece has begun evacuating migrants from the main Idomeni camp on the Macedonia border, while the flow of refugees arriving on Aegean islands has slowed to a trickle, officials said on Saturday. Eight buses transported around 400 refugees from Idomeni to nearby refugee camps Friday, local police sources said. A dozen more buses were waiting for migrants ...

Seoul / AFP North Korea released a new propaganda video on Saturday menacingly titled “Last Chance”, showing a submarine-launched nuclear missile laying waste to Washington and concluding with the US flag in flames. The four-minute video romps through the history of US-Korean relations and ends with a digitally manipulated sequence showing a missile surging through clouds, swerving back to the ...

Bloomberg Banks’ latitude in assessing their biggest source of risk is set to be curtailed as global regulators try to prevent the financial industry from gaming capital requirements. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has proposed to remove the option for lenders to use their own models to determine how much capital they need to fund exposures to financial firms, ...