■ REAL ESTATE
Hong Kong to relaunch REIT
The Hong Kong government said yesterday it will relaunch the world's largest property sale this week, nearly a year after it saw off a legal challenge that delayed the original plan. The sale will see publicly-owned malls and car parks scattered throughout the city's public housing estates bundled into a trust and traded on the open market. The Housing Authority, which owns the public housing assets, said it will raise up to HK$19.83 billion (US$2.54 billion) through the sale of 1.93 billion units of the so-called Link real estate investment trust (REIT) in a global initial public offering or IPO. The international offering has been priced in a range of HK$9.70 to HK$10.30 each unit, lower than the range of HK$10.51 to HK$10.83 when the trust was first launched last year. Applications for shares will be available starting today and trading of the units has been scheduled for Nov. 25.
■ AVIATION
Malaysia Air cutting costs
Flagship carrier Malaysia Airlines will launch a cost-cutting drive from next month, with some senior staff taking pay cuts of up to 30 percent, news reports said yesterday. In a memo sent to staff earlier this week, Malaysia Airlines Chairman Munir Majid said that the company's "financial performance is precarious and has increasingly become a source for concern," the New Sunday Times reported. "There is now a need to extend the scope of the cost reduction focus and put in place more aggressive measures," Munir said. In the note, Munir said that Malaysia Airlines plans to cut its fuel bill by 10 percent this fiscal year. Among other measures to be taken are the deferment of non-critical investments and services and a freeze on new recruitments. Division heads reporting to top management would take a voluntary pay cut of 15 to 30 percent starting next month.
■ BANKING
Mitsubishi to raise cash
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial, the world's biggest banking group by assets, is looking at raising up to US$4.2 billion next year, a news report said yesterday. The money would go to repaying public funds that were used to replenish its capital, the Nihon Keizai newspaper said, citing sources in the group. Japan has injected nearly ?10 trillion (US$84.7 billion) into 16 major banks since the late 1990s to shore up their balance sheets as they struggled to improve profitability and write off a mountain of bad loans. As of Sept. 30, UFJ had roughly ?1.4 trillion of public funds to be returned to the government. The planned fund-raising would likely come through issuing preferred subscription securities, the paper said, and would aim at raising between US$2.5 billion and US$4.2 billion.
■ AVIATION
Airbus to pay compensation
Airbus SAS, the world's biggest maker of commercial aircraft, will pay airlines millions of dollars in compensation for late deliveries of its A380 jetliners. Singapore Airlines, Qantas Airways Ltd and Malaysian Airline System Bhd are seeking compensation from Airbus because deliveries of A380 planes they ordered may delayed as long as a half-year. "Remember, the airplane costs about US$285 million a copy, so I think it is safe to say we are talking about a couple of million dollars," Airbus Chief Commercial Officer John Leahy told Nine Network's Business Sunday program yesterday. An A380, the world's largest passenger plane, landed in Sydney yesterday on a test flight.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS