How has the past year affected OTP Pension Funds’ performance? After a negative, pessimistic year in 2008 we achieved real success last year. In terms of investments, 2009 was also the most successful year of the Funds. Last year for instance we achieved a yield of 33.51 percent in our growth portfolio, having the highest…
Specialising in market niches such as government banking, infrastructure projects, factoring to suppliers of government-owned firms, agribusiness, and fiduciary services, Banco Interacciones continues to strengthen its structure through good results and a 100 percent plough back net income policy. In 2009 the net income was 39 percent higher than the previous year, exceeding shareholders expectations….
Global trade will face lingering protectionism for up to two years, as the job market reels from the global financial crisis, World Trade Organisation Director-General Pascal Lamy said recently. “We are not out of the woods in coping with this protectionist tensions,” Lamy told reporters in the Chilean capital Santiago during a visit. “We on…
The Bank of Japan could say this month that consumer prices will stop falling next fiscal year, sources say, but analysts said it would keep its easing bias as a full-fledged escape from deflation is still a distant goal. That would mark an upgrade to the BOJ’s current price forecast for the year to March…
Eurozone finance ministers approved a 30 billion euro emergency aid plan for debt-plagued Greece on April 11. Together with at least 10 billion euros expected from the IMF in the first year, it could add up to the biggest multilateral financial rescue ever attempted. “This has been a very important intervention,” Alessandro Profumo, the head…
“Borrowing for this year is even closed. There will be no more borrowing,” Geoffrey Mwau, economic secretary at the Finance Ministry, told reporters. Treasury wants an additional 27.62 billion shillings for recurrent expenditure and another 14.39 billion shillings for development programmes. The budget factored in domestic borrowing of 109.5 billion shillings but the government increased…
Africa’s contribution to the global body of scientific research is very small and does little to benefit its own populations, according to a report from Thomson Reuters. Like India and China, Africa suffers from a “haemorrhage of talent”, the report said, with many of its best brains leaving to study abroad and failing to return….
Though foreign investors have slowly started coming back to the region, there still exists a 40-50 percent discount between the Middle East markets and that of the emerging economies, mainly the BRIC nations, said Zin Bekkali. “BRIC is still beautiful, the fundamentals are similar to the region but it has got expensive now. So that…
China’s agency overseeing big state-owned businesses has received plans from 78 state companies spelling out how they intend to sell out of the nation’s heady property market, according to sources. The China Securities Journal also reported that the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) was compiling a general plan to achieve the divestment, intended…
The World Bank is set to approve a controversial $3.75bn loan to help South African state utility Eskom develop a coal-fired power plant despite objections from the US and environmental groups. Eskom has argued it has no immediate alternative but to develop the 4,800-megawatt Medupi coal-fired plant in the northern Limpopo region to ease chronic…
