Chile: all smiles on the debt front
By Matt Kennard
Felipe Larraín, Chile’s finance minister, had a big smile on his face Thursday morning as he talked reporters through his country’s successful $1.35bn bond issue at Deutsche Bank’s offices on Wall Street.
He had reason to be cheerful. The Chilean government has just sold $1bn of 10-year dollar-denominated bond, yielding 3.35 per cent, the lowest borrowing costs in Latin American history for a sovereign issuer, according to Larraín. Continue reading »
Brazil: Gaddafi’s sneaky nip-and-tuck
Last week, Brazilian television featured a local – if bizarre – angle on the Libya story. The ousted Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammer Gaddafi, it seems is one of the more notorious past foreign customers of an industry Brazil is famous for – plastic surgery.
Venezuela: the importance of accounting
To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to lose a few hundred million dollars may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose $29bn looks like carelessness.
After hundreds of millions went missing from state oil company PDVSA’s pension fund earlier this year, it emerged last month that no less than $29bn has been mislaid from state development fund Fonden. What is remarkable, in both cases, is the total absence of outrage among the majority of Venezuelans, who no longer seem surprised at levels of “misfortune” or “carelessness” that in other countries would be considered staggering. Continue reading »
Brazil: taking a stand against corruption
On Wednesday, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff took her daughter and grandson to watch the traditional Independence Day parade at the Esplanada dos Ministérios, the main road in Brasília where the federal government’s ministries and the National Congress are located. The president did not acknowledge them but directly on the other side of the Esplanada, thousands of people were gathered to protest against corruption.
Hot on the trail of corruption protests in other emerging markets, such as India, Brazilians are marching in their thousands to voice their opposition against one of the country’s most endemic problems. Continue reading »
Serbia cuts rates, who’s next?
Serbia’s central bank cut its benchmark interest rate, the second highest in Europe after Belarus, in an attempt to boost its sluggish economic growth.
The Balkan central bank, which aspires to become an EU candidate country, is the latest in the emerging markets to shift its focus from inflation to the global slow-down. Continue reading »
Genel: a flag-bearer for Turkey’s MENA ambitions
Former BP chief Tony Hayward’s new incarnation would hardly have seemed likely a year or so ago. Hayward’s ambition is for Genel, the oil exploration group his Vallares investment vehicle is buying, to be seen as a “Turkish champion”, a company Ankara can be proud of.
The Slough-born Hayward might not seem like the most natural Turkish flag-waver. But he argues that the group’s Turkish identity is particularly relevant, since Genel’s area of activity is Kurdish Northern Iraq and the group has aspirations in the broader Middle East. Continue reading »
Ice-hockey: the death of dreams
By Courtney Weaver in Moscow and Ivana Kottasová in London
The Russian plane crash in which almost the entire Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice-hockey team died, has cast a long shadow over the country’s hopes for developing its all-star Kontinental Hockey League.
The disaster, which killed some of the sport’s top players, has raised some serious questions about the way the KHL is run – and dampened long-held aspirations to overtake the US’s National Hockey League as the world’s premier competition. Continue reading »
Hollywood: to Bollywood and beyond
It’s a simple romantic tale of a boy, a girl and their triumph over adversity – a story that’s been told a thousand times. But Engeyum Eppothum (“everywhere all the time”), an upcoming film from Fox Star Studios, shows how Hollywood’s invasion of Bollywood is moving into a different dimension as the US film industry targets a new generation of international moviegoers. Continue reading »
S Africa: counting the cost of strikes
For analysts seeking to quantify the costs of this year’s “strike season” in South Africa, an answer, or at least a partial one, may have surfaced.
On Thursday, Statistics South Africa released figures for manufacturing and mining output in July which made for grim reading.
Manufacturing production was down 6 per cent year-on-year, while mining output contracted by 5.1 per cent compared to July last year. Continue reading »
Santander eyeing another Polish bank?
The aftershocks of the 2008 economic crisis are continuing to reverberate through the Polish banking market – with shares of Kredyt Bank up more than 3 per cent on reports that Spain’s Santander is mulling a bid.
KBC, the Polish subsidiary of Belgium’s KBC, survived the crisis thanks to a €7bn cash injection from the Belgian government, and is now flogging its Polish businesses, Kredyt Bank and insurer Warta, in order to repay the aid. Continue reading »
Russia counts the cost of drinking
Employers in Russia are not known for compassion – unless they are dealing with drunkenness. A hangover is still seen in many offices and factories as an excuse for skipping work, turning up late or just being grumpy and unproductive. However, as the Kremlin steps up its campaign against alcoholism, experts are counting the economic cost of Russians’ excessive drinking habits. Continue reading »
360buy.com: great pitch, tough sell
Becoming China’s Amazon.com sounds like a tantalising prospect. Selling DVDs and books to China’s hundreds of millions of internet users could be about as lucrative as it gets.
Well, that’s likely to be the pitch from 360buy.com if it does indeed seek to raise $4-5bn in an IPO. But the track record of other US-listed Chinese internet companies provides a worrying template. Continue reading »
Russia’s booming internet market has received another huge injection of growth funding. Ozon.ru, the largest Russian online retailer, has raised $100m in new venture-capital funding, writes FT’s Tim Bradshaw. Continue reading »
New York headlines
* OECD cuts global growth forecast
* Libya’s new leaders plan to review $150bn in international contracts
* China to back London as offshore renminbi centre
* Oil producers target Asia as outlook in West bleak
[snap]: Medvedev calls for aviation consolidation
Russia needs to “radically change” civil aviation, president Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday as he visited the site of a plane crash that killed 43 people including several of the country’s top ice-hockey stars.
He called for the number of airlines to be reduced sharply and said the government should help revive the civil aviation fleet, Reuters reported. He added that training for flight crews needed to be improved. Continue reading »
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