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Islamabad / Bloomberg Pakistan’s central bank left interest rates unchanged for a third straight meeting to contain a rebound in inflation and support the rupee. The State Bank of Pakistan kept the target policy rate at 6 percent, Governor Ashraf Mahmood Wathra said in a statement in Karachi on Saturday. The move was predicted by 18 of 19 analysts in ...

New Delhi / Bloomberg Bharti Airtel Ltd., India’s largest wireless operator, said it will buy airwaves from Aircel Ltd. taking its spectrum acquisitions this year to $1.2 billion as it prepares to counter Reliance Industries Ltd. that’s starting fourth-generation wireless services this year. The company controlled by billionaire Chairman Sunil Mittal will spend $524 million to purchase airwaves from Aircel ...

New Delhi / Bloomberg Prime Minister Narendra Modi is starting to see some success in getting infrastructure projects moving again. About a third of more than 1,000 projects valued at 14 trillion rupees ($210 billion) are delayed as of January, down from 42 percent a year earlier, according to government data released on Thursday. Cost overruns have come down from ...

Madrid / Reuters Spain plans to ask the European Commission for an extra year to meet its public deficit targets, El Pais reported on Sunday, after missing the mark with its 2015 deficit and raising the prospect of further spending cuts to narrow the budget gap. The country last month reported a 2015 deficit of 5 percent of economic output, ...

Bloomberg Italian Treasury and central bank officials will meet with executives of major banks, including UniCredit SpA and Intesa Sanpaolo SpA, on Monday to discuss the creation of a fund that would buy shares in bank recapitalizations and help the institutions tackle non-performing loans, according to people with knowledge of the talks. The Rome meeting will try to finalize discussions ...

Paris / AFP Sporadic violence erupted as tens of thousands of people took to the streets in dozens of French cities in the latest protests against labour reforms seen as threatening workers’ rights. Police and protesters clashed in western Rennes and Nantes as well as Paris, leaving several injured, as demonstrations across the country aimed to keep up pressure against ...

Bloomberg The European Central Bank is struggling to revive the region’s economy, Britain and Greece are moving closer to leaving the European Union — and Switzerland is feeling the pain. The franc has been climbing, again. Since hitting a low of 1.12 against the euro on Feb. 3, the currency has gained almost 3 percent, and is now trading just ...

Frankfurt / AFP Germany at the start of the year introduced a corporate “women’s quota” obliging its 100 biggest companies to fill at least 30 percent of their supervisory board seats with females. But for many, including several of the women executives themselves, the new legislation has so far proved something of a “paper tiger”. “The law is addressing the ...

New York / AFP Confronted with a sluggish global economy, US companies have settled on a controversial tool that rewards shareholders and executives: share buybacks. First permitted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 1982, the use of share buybacks has spread rapidly over the last five years due in part to pressure from activist investors anxious for a ...

Washington / AFP US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told Europe’s powerful competition commissioner that the EU review of tax breaks given to multinationals could have an “outsized” impact on US companies. In a recent meeting , Lew expressed concerns to Margrethe Vestager, who is leading the campaign to end excessive tax breaks by EU members to huge multinational firms, that ...