■ Telecoms
Orascom may boost stake
Orascom Telecom Holding SAE, the Middle East's largest mobile-phone operator by subscriptions, may boost its stake in Hutchison Telecommunications International Ltd (和記電訊) by 3.3 percent, chief executive officer Naguib Sawiris said on Saturday. Orascom, which agreed last December to buy a 19.3 percent stake in Hutchison for US$1.3 billion, wants to merge with the Asian telecommunications company, Sawiris said. Hutchison is a unit of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd (和記黃埔), which is owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing (李嘉誠). Sawiris is seeking to expand in Asia and Africa to make Orascom one of the world's 10 largest telecommunications companies.
■ Automobiles
VW `planning price cut'
Volkswagen, which is at odds with unions over high labor costs and over-staffing, is planning to cut the price of one of its volume cars and introduce a Brazilian-made model, an industry newspaper, Automobilwoche, said on Saturday. It said the company's head of brands, Wolfgang Bernhard, proposed to cut the cost of manufacturing the Polo, by 2,000 euros (US$2,500) per vehicle from 2008. The weekly said he also wanted to offer Europeans a no-frills model, the Fox, which is currently produced in Brazil. Volkswagen declined to respond, saying it did not comment on speculation about models. The company also partly denied a report in a news weekly, Der Spiegel, that 30,000, not 20,000 jobs in Germany, might be eliminated as Volkswagen raises productivity. VW's head of personnel, Horst Neumann, said through a spokesman he had not spoken of any specific number. The spokesman declined to say which number was correct.
■ Banking
Lawmakers urge revisions
Japanese ruling and opposition lawmakers urged the Bank of Japan yesterday to introduce asset disclosure rules after the central bank chief admitted having kept a scandal-tainted investment. "They should revise their internal regulations" on asset disclosure, said Toranosuke Katayama, a senior official of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party. "I think at least assets held by a governor of the Bank of Japan must be disclosed," Katayama said. Embattled central bank chief Toshihiko Fukui said on Friday he made millions of yen in profits from an investment in a scandal-tainted fund that has triggered calls for his resignation. Fukui, who first made the investment just before taking office, pledged to report precise figures by tomorrow. Fukui, who was then in the private sector, had invested in the fund of Yoshiaki Murakami, a former bureaucrat who became an activist for shareholder rights.
■ Banking
Japanese looking to Islam
Japan will study Islamic financial practices in a bid to attract Middle Eastern oil money, a daily said yesterday. The government-backed Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) has formed a four-man advisory board of Islamic legal scholars the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said. JBIC will also study Islamic-style finance in a tie-up with Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp, Mizuho Corporate Bank and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, the business daily said. The aim is to help Japanese private financial institutions enter the Islamic financial market, Nihon Keizai said.
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
DEFENDING DEMOCRACY: Taiwan shares the same values as those that fought in WWII, and nations must unite to halt the expansion of a new authoritarian bloc, Lai said The government yesterday held a commemoration ceremony for Victory in Europe (V-E) Day, joining the rest of the world for the first time to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Taiwan honoring V-E Day signifies “our growing connections with the international community,” President William Lai (賴清德) said at a reception in Taipei on the 80th anniversary of V-E Day. One of the major lessons of World War II is that “authoritarianism and aggression lead only to slaughter, tragedy and greater inequality,” Lai said. Even more importantly, the war also taught people that “those who cherish peace cannot
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
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