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  Bloomberg Raiffeisen Bank International AG rose to the highest in about 10 months after announcing that it will go ahead with a plan to merge with its parent to address a capital shortfall at Austria’s biggest group of credit cooperatives. RBI climbed as much as 2.8 percent to 14.39 euros in Vienna, the highest since Dec. 9. The company ...

  Bloomberg Lloyds Banking Group Plc is considering taking on Bank of America Corp.’s (BoA) liabilities in the British payment protection-insurance scandal as it looks to beat private-equity firms in the bidding for the MBNA credit-card business, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Britain’s largest mortgage lender is vying with private-equity firms including Cerberus Capital Management and Advent ...

  WASHINGTON / AFP President Barack Obama lifted US economic sanctions on the former pariah state of Myanmar, the culmination of years of rapprochement that Obama has worked to facilitate. The Southeast Asian nation, also known as Burma, has pursued political reforms over the last five years following decades of oppressive military rule. Obama had announced plans to lift the ...

  Bloomberg The Philippines’ new government plans to court Chinese investment to fund an ambitious infrastructure programme, the latest sign of warming ties between the two nations that have been at loggerheads over territorial claims in the South China Sea. “The last administration hardly spoke to them,” Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez said in an interview in the World Bank’s headquarters ...

  Hanoi / AFP A Vietnamese court has rejected hundreds of lawsuits filed by fishermen who demanded more compensation from a Taiwanese-owned steel plant responsible for a devastating toxic leak, a leading activist said on Saturday. In a rare case of civic action in authoritarian Vietnam, crowds of fishermen swamped a court house last month to file 506 lawsuits against ...

Bloomberg China watchers are starting to put a price tag on what any collapse in the nation’s red-hot property market could cost banks. A drop of 30 percent in housing prices could cause 4 percent of total loans worth 4.1 trillion yuan ($615 billion) to sour, according to DBS Vickers Hong Kong Ltd. Commerzbank AG said such a drop could ...

  Tokyo / AFP A fifth of the Japanese workforce faces the risk of death from overwork, according to a new government survey into the country’s notoriously strenuous working culture. Hundreds of deaths related to overwork — from strokes, heart attacks and suicide — are reported every year in Japan, along with a host of serious health problems, sparking lawsuits ...

Londres / AFP British business leaders on Saturday urged the government to rule out a hard break with the European Union, saying the uncertainty over the terms of Brexit was impacting investment decisions. “What we would like is the ruling out of the really worst options,” Carolyn Fairbairn, the director general of CBI, Britain’s biggest business lobby group, told BBC ...

  Bloomberg An experimental Novartis AG treatment for a form of advanced breast cancer slashed the risks of death and the disease progressing in a study, paving way for the Swiss drugmaker to seek regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe by the end of the year. Novartis expects to win the first approval for the drug, ribociclib, by the ...

  Bloomberg Brazil’s state-controlled oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA is preparing to announce a domestic fuel policy that will avert costly subsidies that drained profits during Brazil’s previous government, Chief Executive Officer Pedro Parente said in an interview. Petrobras, which hasn’t adjusted gasoline and diesel prices for more than a year, will set prices at or above parity with international ...