INVESTMENT
Brunel sets green goals
Companies and asset managers must show progress toward climate goals by 2022, Brunel Pension Partnership, one of Britain’s biggest pension fund managers, said yesterday, or the fund will withdraw its investment. Brunel, which manages £30 billion (US$39 billion) in assets for 10 local government schemes, said in its first climate policy it was aiming to influence companies’ and investment managers’ behavior. Brunel will require its “material holdings” to cut carbon emissions by 2022. It said it could vote against the reappointment of board members or divest from companies if they fail to act.
WEALTH MANAGEMENT
Berlin probes Saudi scheme
German prosecutors are investigating two former Deutsche Bank AG employees for allegedly paying US$1.1 million to secure the wealth management business of a senior Saudi royal, the Financial Times reported. The money transfers were arranged in 2011 and 2012, along with other perks, including an internship and a seminar at a Swiss ski resort, according to the results of an international probe, seen by the Financial Times. The lender conducted its probe between 2014 and 2016, leading to the departure of six employees and 12 staff having their bonuses suspended.
LABOR
Finnish paper strike looms
About 9,000 workers at Finnish paper mills were to go on strike yesterday after wage talks broke down, their labor union said in a statement, the latest in a series of labor conflicts to hit Finland. Another 6,000 employees at sawmills, plywood mills and other forestry plants had already planned to strike yesterday, bringing the overall outage to around 15,000 workers. The strikes are set to last for three weeks, but could end earlier if a deal is reached with the mills, the union said. Employers have vowed to respond with a lockout of workers at a dozen plants from Feb. 10 unless a deal is reached before then, further paralyzing Finland’s forestry industry, a major source of export revenue.
AUTOMAKERS
Ford to settle with US$30m
Ford Motor Corp will pay at least US$30 million in a proposed settlement over a class-action lawsuit related to failing transmissions in its Fiesta and Focus vehicles. The lawsuit represents nearly 2 million owners and former owners of the cars, which had bad dual-clutch transmissions, the Detroit Free Press reported on Saturday, citing court documents. In addition to the US$30 million in cash reimbursement, there will be an easier process for people to get compensated and a simplified buyback program for defective vehicles, the report said. Ford spokesman T.R. Reid said the company believes the settlement is “fair and reasonable” and expects it to be approved during a final hearing on Feb. 28. The case was filed in 2012.
LABOR
Unions, Jingye reach deal
UK trade unions have reached a deal with China’s Jingye Group (敬業集團) about its provisional deal to buy British Steel Ltd, acknowledging that up to 500 jobs will go in exchange for protecting pay and employment terms. “The sale to Jingye is now firmly in sight and we would encourage all stakeholders in the business to focus on reaching a positive conclusion,” three trade unions said in a joint statement released on Friday last week. Jingye is making progress with securing approvals for the deal and aims to complete the takeover in the first quarter of this year, the Chinese group said in a statement.
TOURISM
Russia halts China tours
Russian tour operators have stopped selling tours to China due to the coronavirus outbreak there and are only bringing Russian tourists back, Association of Russian Tour Operators vice president Dmitry Gorin said yesterday. “The tours are not being sold because there is a safety threat,” he said. “Sales stopped on Friday.” Russia, which has daily direct flights to several Chinese cities, has no confirmed cases of the new virus. Around 7,000 Russian tourists who bought package holidays are currently still in China, Gorin said. Around 6,000 of those are on Hainan island with the rest on the mainland, he said.
ELECTRICITY
Transition bonds touted
Japanese power producers have been emitting more carbon dioxide since a nuclear disaster in 2011 led to an increased reliance on fossil fuels, but a new kind of bond could help them reverse that trend. So-called transition bonds can pay for not-so-green companies to move toward cleaner business models, and Japanese electrical utilities could issue them to help reduce carbon emissions, according to Mana Nakazora, chief ESG and chief credit analyst at BNP Paribas SA. Japan aims to reduce emissions from fossil-fuel generated power by 34 percent by 2030, as part of a broader commitment to cut total emissions by 26 percent, according to BloombergNEF.
OIL
Saudi monitoring outbreak
Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said yesterday the kingdom was closely monitoring developments in global oil markets resulting from “gloomy expectations” over the impact of the new coronavirus on the Chinese and global economy and oil market fundamentals. He said he was confident the Chinese government and international community could contain the virus and eradicate it. He said the impact on global oil markets was “primarily driven by psychological factors and extremely negative expectations adopted by some market participants despite its very limited impact on global oil demand.”
OFFICE SPACE
WeWork signs Gympass deal
WeWork has signed a deal to provide space to 250 employees of gym membership app company Gympass in New York, the latest example of the US office-sharing start-up’s majority owner, Softbank Group Corp, using its connections to buoy its business, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday. Softbank is also a minority investor in Gympass. While it does not have absolute control over it, it encourages its portfolio companies to collaborate, one of the sources said. Around 25,000 employees at Softbank-backed companies, including Uber Technologies Inc, Brazilian online housing broker QuintoAndar and online real-estate marketplace Compass are in WeWork offices.
RWANDA
Bad weather drives inflation
Changing weather patterns are pushing up food prices and will drive inflation in Rwanda for the first few months of this year, central bank Governor John Rwangombwa said. Unexpected heavy rains in the second half of last year caused some crop damage and food inflation reached 23.8 percent in December, the highest in almost three years. “Because of the bad rains we had in the last quarter of 2019 we expect inflation in the first quarter of 2020 to be slightly above our medium-term benchmark of 5 percent,” Rwangombwa said on Friday. However, the rate will remain inside the target band of 2 percent to 8 percent, he said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
US CONSCULTANT: The US Department of Commerce’s Ursula Burns is a rarely seen US government consultant to be put forward to sit on the board, nominated as an independent director Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday nominated 10 candidates for its new board of directors, including Ursula Burns from the US Department of Commerce. It is rare that TSMC has nominated a US government consultant to sit on its board. Burns was nominated as one of seven independent directors. She is vice chair of the department’s Advisory Council on Supply Chain Competitiveness. Burns is to stand for election at TSMC’s annual shareholders’ meeting on June 4 along with the rest of the candidates. TSMC chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) was not on the list after in December last