Seoul / AFP South Korea says efforts to lift the Sewol ferry that sank more than two years ago may drag on into next year, with salvage operations hampered by poor visibility and the sheer scale of the undertaking. The 6,825-tonne vessel was carrying 476 people when it capsized and sank off the southwestern island of Jindo in April …

  London / AFP Stock markets swung mostly lower on Monday, with attention fixed on central bank policy before an ECB meeting this week and speculation on the outlook for US borrowing costs. Asian markets diverged following healthy gains for world equities at the end of last week, as investors bet that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates before …

  Dubai / Reuters Potential investors in the Saudi Arabian government’s first international bond issue are preoccupied by a key question: how will the Saudis resolve their dilemma between size and pricing? Any issuer must choose between raising as much money as it can and selling debt as cheaply as possible. But as Saudi Arabia holds investor roadshows in the …

  Bloomberg Iran, OPEC’s third-biggest member, plans to boost its oil output to 4 million barrels a day this year, potentially complicating the producer group’s plan to cut supply in an effort to prop up prices. Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said he hopes the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will agree next month at a meeting in Vienna to …

  Reuters Iran will launch next month its first new style tender to develop oil and gas fields since the lifting of international sanctions, a leading oil official said on Monday, after months of internal discussions over the terms, intended to be more alluring to foreign companies. OPEC’s third largest oil producer hopes to revive its energy sector following the …

  Bloomberg Oil investors must be getting dizzy. In the two months since OPEC began talking about capping production, speculators’ sentiment has swung wildly, with government and exchange data showing the four biggest weekly position changes ever for the two global benchmark crudes. The latest shift is to optimism, with money managers the most bullish on West Texas Intermediate oil …

Bloomberg Oil traded near $50 a barrel in New York as U.S. producers increased drilling and OPEC nations added supply, threatening to compound a global surplus. Futures were little changed after slipping 0.2 percent Friday. Output from OPEC member Libya expanded to 560,000 barrels a day, according to National Oil Corp., up from 540,000 last week, while Iran repeated plans …

  Reuters Kuwait National Petroleum Co (KNPC) expects to finalise a loan of well over $5 billion to finance its Clean Fuels project by the end of the first quarter of next year, sources involved in the project said. The state-owned refiner had originally said it planned to complete the fundraising, one of the world’s largest-ever loans backed by export …

  Reuters Saudi Oger has begun talks with potential buyers for its 20.93 percent stake in Arab Bank in a deal that could raise about $1 billion for the embattled construction giant, sources aware of the matter said. Oger was one of two large Saudi contractors charged with implementing the kingdom’s grand infrastructure plans before the fall in oil prices …

  Bloomberg The UK dropped out of businesses’ top five locations for investments for the first time in seven years as fears about the country’s plans to exit the European Union added complexity to international deals, consultants Ernst & Young LLP said in a survey of executives. British businesses rank behind investments in the US, China, Germany, Canada and France, …