MEDIA
News Corp nets huge rebate
Rupert Murdoch’s Australian operations pocketed an A$882 million (US$800 million) tax rebate from the new conservative government, reports said yesterday, blowing a major hole in the country’s budget. The massive payout to News Corp — one of the largest-ever made by the Australian Taxation Office — related to complex shuffling of assets through local and overseas businesses in 1989 that netted the company a A$2 billion tax deduction, according to the Australian Financial Review. The payout was a significant element of the A$17 billion spending blowout unveiled by the new government in December last year.
BANKING
Lloyds may go solely retail
Lloyds Banking Group PLC is in talks with Britain’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) over “ringfencing” rules in an attempt to save its investment banking functions, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. The state-backed group is concerned that the cost of operations after ringfencing takes effect may outweigh the benefits, forcing the group to shut investment banking activities and operate as a retail business alone, sources familiar with Lloyds’ plans told the newspaper. Ringfencing for banking groups in the UK is scheduled to be implemented by 2019. The PRA is expected to consult and finalize the structure of ringfencing with banks this year.
INSURANCE
RSA calls for buyers
British insurer RSA is looking for prospective buyers for the sale of one of its Canadian businesses, which could help the company raise as much as £200 million (US$335 million), Sky News reported on Sunday. RSA has begun the auction of Noraxis Capital Corp, a network of Canadian regional insurance brokers, the news service said, citing unidentified sources. RSA spokeswoman said a business review was under way and RSA would announce the outcome on Thursday next week. She declined to comment on the Sky News story. RSA operates in 31 countries across Europe, Asia, Latin America, Canada and the Middle East.
INTERNET
Kickstarter site hacked
Online fundraising site Kickstarter says hackers got some of its customer data. The breach was disclosed on Saturday on the Kickstarter blog. The company said it learned about the breach from US law enforcement on Wednesday last week and closed it immediately. Cofounder Yancey Strickler said hackers accessed usernames, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The passwords are encrypted, but the company said it is possible for a hacker to guess a weak or obvious password. It recommended that users change their passwords.
ENERGY
GDF Suez contests reports
French energy giant GDF Suez said on Sunday it was “astonished” by Belgian press reports alleging it had tried to avoid paying local taxes. “GDF Suez is astonished by the published articles and formally contests their content,” the company said in a statement. It said it had no knowledge of a probe being carried out by Belgium’s Special Tax Inspectorate. “If such an inquiry were to be opened, then GDF Suez would, as normal, fully cooperate,” it added. The statement came in response to a report in the weekend edition of L’Echo business daily which alleged that GDF Suez had inflated the bill for gas it supplied to its Belgian unit by hundreds of millions of euros in 2012.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained