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Bloomberg After relying on oil to fuel its economy for more than half a century, Saudi Arabia is turning to its other abundant natural resource to take it beyond the oil age — desert. The kingdom is converting thousands of square kilometers of sand into new cities as it seeks to diversify away from crude, create jobs and boost investment. ...

TRIPOLI / Reuters Production from Libya’s largest oil field was returning to normal after being briefly disrupted by armed protesters who broke into a control room in the coastal city of Zawiya, the National Oil Corporation (NOC) said on Monday. A pipeline supplying jet fuel and gasoline from Zawiya to Tripoli that the protesters had also closed has reopened, the ...

CAIRO / Reuters Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal will invest about $800 million to expand the Four Seasons resort in Sharm el-Sheikh, in partnership with Talaat Moustafa Holding Group, Egypt’s Investment Minister Sahar Nasr said. Billionaire Alwaleed’s investment will also include establishing two new hotels in al-Alamein, a town on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, and Madinaty, a residential compound east ...

Bloomberg Uganda chose a group including General Electric Co. to build and operate a 60,000-barrels-a-day refinery that will process part of the crude extracted from fields being developed by Total SA and Tullow Oil Plc. The Albertine Graben Refinery Consortium — which also includes Yaatra Ventures LLC, Intracontinent Asset Holdings Ltd. and Italy’s Saipem SpA — was picked after a ...

Bloomberg Oil traded near $49 a barrel in New York amid speculation that plentiful supplies will continue to thwart any further rallies. Futures fell 1.3 percent. While growth in US drilling has stalled and Libya’s production revival was dealt a setback by protests, rebounding output is still capping prices, according to Saxo Bank A/S. A committee co-chaired by Kuwait and ...

Bloomberg Norway’s oil industry has been salivating for years over the Arctic Lofoten islands, which could hold billions of barrels of crude. It will likely have to keep dreaming. The general election next month is unlikely to lift a deadlock that’s keeping a ban on drilling off the environmentally sensitive archipelago as more and more Norwegians are turning their backs ...

Bloomberg Country Garden Holdings Co. said it’s looking to attract customers from countries such as Thailand and Vietnam as some Chinese buyers hit by capital controls have pulled back from the $100 billion Forest City project in southern Malaysia. China’s escalating crackdown on capital outflows this year has spooked buyers seeking to invest in property abroad, with some reconsidering past ...

Bloomberg WeWork Cos., the world’s largest provider of shared work spaces, will invest $500 million in Southeast Asia and South Korea, as the New York-based company steps up its expansion plans in global markets. As part of the effort, WeWork will acquire Spacemob, a Singapore-based co-working startup founded in early 2016 by entrepreneur Turochas “T” Fuad and backed by Vertex ...

Bloomberg Prosecutors demanded a 12-year jail term for Lee Jae-yong, accusing the billionaire vice chairman of Samsung Electronics Co. of bribing a presidential confidante to increase his control over the world’s biggest maker of smartphones and memory chips. Lee has been in detention since February and is the highest-profile business figure drawn into a scandal that led to the ouster ...

Bloomberg Living in the world’s most-expensive property market means having to set aside more than half your income as mortgage payments. Hong Kong’s mortgage-payment-to-income ratio rose to 54.2 percent in June, the highest since 1998, figures from Centaline Property Agency show. The low affordability is a result of the steep rise in home prices, which have kept soaring despite efforts ...