The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.

  Tim Culpan / David Fickling Companies in both China and the U.S. want to develop driverless cars. Slick videos and flashy powerpoint slides envision a future where humans sit back and relax while their transport pods glide across highways, seamlessly merge into traffic and pull up smoothly at the kerb. Miles Google’s driverless cars have clocked 1.5 million. What ...

  On the surface, the concept of a Russian pivot to Asia made sense, particularly greater cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. But, as a pair of fellows from the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin and a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center made clear in separate articles published this month, Russia’s Asia pivot has failed so far ...

  The presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, the two countries most affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, used the meltdown’s 30-year anniversary on Tuesday to make political statements. It looks like neither of them — nor Russian President Vladimir Putin — has drawn the right conclusions from the tragedy, which probably hastened the Soviet Union’s demise. Unit 4 of the ...

  Britain is asking itself whether quitting the European Union would be good or bad — for Britain. President Barack Obama is advising Britain to stay — presumably because he thinks that would be good for the U.S. But what if Brexit would be good for Britain and the U.S. mainly because it would be good for Europe? I’m led ...

  London / Reuters Barclays reported a worse than expected 33 percent slump in pretax profits for the first three months of the year, as the lender followed its US peers in reporting falling investment banking revenues in a weak global market environment. Barclays said first quarter pretax profits fell to £793 million ($1.15 billion), just below the average forecast ...

  Bloomberg Standard Chartered Plc Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters expects erratic swings in global markets to continue for at least the rest of this year, complicating his efforts to reinvigorate earnings and restore the Asia-focused lender’s dividend. Reviving “depressed” revenue in the face of a sluggish economy and a slump in commodities prices is “the big challenge,” Winters said. ...

  Doha / AFP Qatar National Bank (QNB) said it is investigating an alleged hack which potentially exposes the names and passwords of a large number of customers. Media reports claimed that a 1.4GB trove of documents has been leaked online anonymously. Among the information reportedly leaked are the bank details of several journalists working for satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera. Another folder ...

Bloomberg Banco Santander SA, Spain’s biggest bank, reported lower first-quarter profit as revenue slumped in its home market and operations aboard were hit by currency effects. Net income fell 5 percent to 1.63 billion euros ($1.84 billion) from 1.72 billion euros a year earlier, the bank said on Wednesday. That beat the 1.5 billion-euro average estimate in a Bloomberg survey ...

Beijing / Bloomberg A Chinese bank head signalled confidence that the government will loosen requirements for lenders’ bad-debt provisions, a move that could help them to report larger profits. A reduction in the coverage ratio to about 120 percent to 130 percent of existing non-performing debt would be “reasonable” and “possible,” Wang Hongzhang, the chairman of China Construction Bank Corp., ...

  Bloomberg Scandinavia’s biggest bank said profit plunged 28 percent last quarter as revenue sank after negative rates and market selloffs created an inhospitable environment for the industry. Nordea Bank AB reported net income of 782 million euros ($884 million), missing the 792 million-euro estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. Net interest income slipped 7 percent while total operating income ...