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  Andy Mukherjee What a difference a year makes, especially when it comes with hundreds of million of dollars in unexpected cash prizes. At the start of 2016, Vedanta Resources Plc’s 2019 dollar bonds were trading at less than 50 cents on the dollar. Now, they’re well above par. Founder and Chairman Anil Agarwal is celebrating by launching a debt-funded ...

  Bloomberg Germany’s state-owned development bank KfW, which gained publicity for erroneously transferring hundreds of millions of euros to Lehman Brothers the day the U.S. firm filed for bankruptcy, has done it again. KfW in February mistakenly transferred more than 5 billion euros ($5.4 billion) to four banks because of a technical glitch that repeated single payments multiple times, according ...

  Bloomberg The standing of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is set to receive another boost after 13 further applicants were granted membership. The accessions will bring the total roster of member countries to 70, and leave Japan and the US as the only Group of Seven states without a stake in the lender. Memberships for Afghanistan, Armenia, ...

  Bloomberg Malaysia’s central bank said this year will be another challenging one for monetary policy as inflation pressure builds and risks loom over the economy. Gross domestic product is forecast to expand 4.3 percent to 4.8 percent this year, Bank Negara Malaysia said in its annual report in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday. That compares with the government’s earlier forecast ...

  Reuters Commercial Bank of Qatar (CBQ) is in talks with banks about a potential international bond issue that will most likely be denominated in US dollars, sources familiar with the matter said. If the deal goes ahead, CBQ would join a growing number of banks from the region tapping the international debt markets this year with the aim of ...

  Bloomberg The UK Financial Conduct Authority re-opened its investigation into Barclays Plc’s 2008 emergency fundraising from Qatar despite issuing a fine in the case four years ago, as charging decisions from a parallel criminal case are set to be announced imminently, according to a person familiar with the probe. The FCA called in a number of people for interviews ...

  Bloomberg Montblanc has become the first brand in the Richemont family of luxury companies to put out a smartwatch. The Montblanc Summit, based on Google’s Android Wear 2 platform, aims to compete with, among others, the Apple Watch and rival Swiss brand TAG Heuer’s Connected Watch (which was released last year and received a major update in the form ...

  AP Apple said purported hacking vulnerabilities disclosed by WikiLeaks this week have all been fixed in recent iPhones and Mac computers. The documents released by the anti-secrecy site Thursday morning pointed to an apparent CIA program to hack Apple devices using techniques that users couldn’t disable by resetting their devices. The iPhone hack was limited to the 3G model ...

  AP An advertising boycott of YouTube is broadening, a sign that big-spending companies doubt Google’s ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videos. PepsiCo, Wal-Mart Stores and Starbucks confirmed that they have also suspended their advertising on YouTube after the Wall Street Journal found Google’s automated programs placed their brands on five videos containing racist content. AT&T, ...

  Reuters Augmented reality may sound like something out of a science fiction film, but the technology is changing manufacturing across the world. From aerospace to automotives, AR is not only increasingly being used on the factory floor, it’s revolutionising it. AR overlays virtual reality over real objects, providing all the necessary data a technician needs to make an assessment ...