DUBAI: When Dubai-based property developer Range Hospitality decided to build a $175 million hotel and residential complex in Iraq's holy city of Karbala, it ran into a common difficulty for investors in the country: raising finance.
It solved (...)
DUBAI: Saudi Arabia's market interest rates are climbing as the economy booms, but the rise is as much due to international pressures as strain on banks' lending resources, and any hike of official rates probably remains distant.
The increase in (...)
DUBAI: One of the Arab world's most unusual and far-flung business empires was born among the booming economies of the oil-rich Gulf. Now it is counting on the internet to fuel expansion around the globe.
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, the 75-year-old (...)
DUBAI: The Egyptian government, seeking to head off a funding crisis, is preparing to raise about $2 billion through its first issue of Islamic bonds, an Islamic scholar familiar with its planning said on Tuesday.
"The Egyptian government is (...)
AMMAN/CAIRO: Mazen Dajani, chief executive of Jordan's CTI Group, says the Arab Spring accomplished what the global financial crisis of 2008-9 did not: it pushed his company, one of the world's largest shippers of cement, into the red.
CTI's (...)
CAIRO: Two months after mass protests ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak last February, Ahmed Essam resigned from his job at a well-established software company to set up a six-person venture developing applications for smart phones.
The (...)
CAIRO: For a political movement that has just triumphed in elections, winning nearly half the seats in Egypt's first parliamentary polls since last year's revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood is sounding remarkably flexible on economic policy.
The (...)
CAIRO: Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood would consider supporting a deal to obtain emergency aid from the IMF, providing there are no conditions attached and alternatives are explored first, a senior official in the Brotherhood said.
With the risk of a (...)
CAIRO: Egypt's financial market regulator said he was preparing steps to help companies resume raising money in the country's moribund capital markets, with active issuance of stocks and bonds still likely to be many months away because of political (...)
DUBAI: An advisor to Goldman Sachs has defended the US bank's $2 billion Islamic bond program against criticism it may contravene religious principles, in a controversy that could affect Western banks' ability to enter the Islamic debt market.
In (...)
DUBAI: Under the threat of a strike this year, Egypt's El Nasr Clothing & Textile Co said it was raising wages 15 percent and boosting workers' allowances, giving permanent contracts to temporary staff, and promoting about 1,500 employees, at a (...)
ABU DHABI: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has started talks with North African governments and private firms on aiding the region, and aims to begin extending loans by the middle of next year, the bank's chief economist said on (...)