Dubai / Emirates Business Aafaq Islamic Finance, in collaboration with Mastercard, has launched unique Sharia-compliant credit cards, boosting its retail segment and capturing the growing credit card market in the country. Aafaq’s retail business expansion is in response to the increasing demand for Sharia-compliant banking products and services in the country, where over 50% of customers use Islamic banking products. ...

ABU DHABI / WAM According to statistics from the Ministry of Finance, the UAE’s total spending on social benefits in 2018 amounted to AED65.74 billion, accounting for 16.8 percent of government spending. This figure highlights the importance of social development to the agendas of the federal government and local governments, in line with the UAE Vision 2021 and the country’s ...

Dubai / Emirates Business The non-oil private sector in Dubai continued to post a marked expansion of total business activity in June, with the rate of growth accelerating further to a new high since the survey began in 2010, according to Emirates NBD Dubai Economy Tracker Index. Among the three key sectors monitored, the strongest overall performance was again registered ...

ABU DHABI / WAM The Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation (FANR), the UAE’s Nuclear Regulator, announced on Monday that it has certified the first group of 15 UAE National Senior Reactor Operators (SROs) and Reactor Operators (ROs) at Nawah Energy Company, the operations and maintenance subsidiary of the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (Enec). The certification is part of complying with ...

Bloomberg Brookfield Asset Management Inc. and Endesa SA are among companies weighing bids for a package of EDP-Energias de Portugal SA electricity assets that could fetch about 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion), people familiar with the matter said. The Portuguese utility is expecting initial bids later this month for about 2 gigawatts of hydroelectric power projects in Spain and Portugal, ...

Bloomberg Loans of as little as $30 and life insurance policies for as low as thirty cents a month: that’s what an Indian digital-payment company wagers will double its revenue and help it break even this year. In its 10 years of existence, One MobiKwik System Pvt has expanded from online payments into financial products including insurance, gold and mutual ...

Bloomberg China’s passenger-car sales showed signs of recovery from a historic rut as dealers offered discounts to clear inventory before new emissions rules kicked in. Retail sales of sedans, sport utility vehicles, minivans and multipurpose vehicles rose 4.9 percent to 1.8 million units in June from a year earlier, according to preliminary numbers from the China Passenger Car Association (CAAM). ...

Bloomberg The latest skepticism to Facebook Inc’s plans for its new cryptocurrency called Libra comes from India as Asia’s third-largest economy is not keen on allowing the digital currency in the country. “Design of the Facebook currency has not been fully explained,” Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Garg said in an interview in New Delhi. “But whatever it is, it would ...

Bloomberg Resurgent tensions between Japan and South Korea threaten to wallop chipmakers from Samsung Electronics Co to SK Hynix Inc, upsetting a carefully choreographed global supply chain by smothering the production of memory chips and other components vital to widely used devices. As the world fixates on Donald Trump’s campaign to contain Huawei Technologies Co and China’s ambitions, a concurrent ...

Bloomberg India’s Tata Group paid lenders and the government about $7.3 billion to help complete the sale of its mobile-phone services business to Bharti Airtel Ltd, a deal that was announced almost two years ago. Tata Sons Pvt, the group holding company, paid the Department of Telecommunications 100 billion rupees late last month, days after settling all pending loans worth ...