■ Oil
Indian sale halted
The Supreme Court yesterday prevented the Indian government from going ahead with the sale of two state-owned oil companies. The court restrained the government from selling its stakes in fuel companies Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd. (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd. (HPCL) without parliamentary approval, officials said. The supreme court bench said the two companies were acquired by the government in the 1970s by special parliamentary legislation and therefore required a similar legislation process now to privatize them. After months of postponement, the Indian cabinet had in January cleared the sale of stakes in the two firms. The sale has been resisted by some key allies of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, including Defense Minister George Fernandes and Petroleum Minister Ram Naik.
■ Exports
BOJ raises assessment
The outlook for Japanese exports is improving and companies are increasing investment, the central bank said in its monthly report for September, raising its assessment of the economy for a second time in three months. While economic activity "continues to be virtually flat as a whole," the bank said in Tokyo, "signs of improvement have been observed in such areas as the environment for exports." Consumer prices will decline at the current "moderate" pace, the bank said today, although price declines may slow temporarily. The bank said it should watch "volatile" movements in government bond yields. The central bank last week also decided to keep monthly purchases of government bonds from banks unchanged at ?1.2 trillion (US$10.2 billion) to pump money into the economy.
■ Consumer goods
LG seeks investor deal
South Korea's LG Group said yesterday it would seek a new deal with unspecified foreign investors to counter the proposed injection of US capital into Hanaro Telecom. LG, the largest shareholder of Hanaro, suggested it was ready to raise US$1.1 billion for the country's second-largest broadband Internet company through a mix of a rights issue and foreign capital. The plan is the latest in LG's repeated attempts to block a consortium of American International Group (AIG) and Newbridge Capital from buying into Hanaro. The consortium, backed by creditors, has proposed a US$1.1 billion fund to acquire a controlling 39.6 percent stake in Hanaro, which has 2.97 million customers.
■ Pharmaceuticals
Dolly cloners sell up
Confronted by mounting losses, the executive board of the firm that cloned Dolly the sheep said on Monday it was putting the company up for sale. PPL Therapeutics PLC, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, lost most of its senior executives in a mass resignation after announcing that net losses for the six months ending June 30 had more than doubled to ?12.8 million (US$20.5 million) from ?5.5 million for the same period last year. PPL's chief executive Geoff Cook and four other members of its seven-member board resigned with immediate effect, it said. The board appointed financial services firm KPMG to help in selling the company. PPL's collapse followed its failure to generate sufficient shareholder support for a plan to restructure and focus on developing Fibrin I, a sealant that stops bleeding during surgery. It had hoped to have the product on the market by 2006.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has