Chinese authorities investigate PetroChina executives

by ; bbc

                         

Chinese authorities are investigating three senior executives of state-owned energy firm PetroChina over "serious breaches of discipline".

China's State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which oversees state firms, did not provide details of the breaches.
PetroChina said two vice-presidents and its chief geologist resigned on Tuesday because of "personal reasons".
The firm's shares fell as much as 5% in early trade in Hong Kong.
PetroChina said in a statement that Vice Presidents Li Hualin and Ran Xinquan as well as Chief Geologist Mr Wang Daofu "are currently under investigation by relevant People's Republic of China authorities".
It added that the three officials had resigned from their respective positions "with immediate effect".
On Monday, the Ministry of Supervision said that Wang Yongchun - another top official at China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the parent firm of PetroChina - had been put under investigation. It did not provide any details about the probe.
In recent months Chinese authorities have been engaged in a high-profile anti-corruption campaign initiated by new President Xi Jinping, who has called corruption a threat to the survival of the ruling Communist Party.
Earlier this month, a former top economic official was expelled from the Communist Party and removed from public office.
State-owned Xinhua news agency reported that Liu Tienan, the former deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, had "accepted huge amounts of bribes".
In July, former Railways Minister Liu Zhijun was given a suspended death sentence for corruption and abuse of power.

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Asia markets hit as Syria fears spark global sell-off

by ;bbc
              Asian stock markets have fallen, extending a global sell-off sparked by growing fears of a military strike against Syria.
Japan's Nikkei 225 index dipped 2.3%, Hong Kong's Hang Seng was down 1.3% while Australia's ASX 200 fell 1.1%.
This follows declines in US and European markets on Tuesday.
Speculation of a strike against Syria, also triggered fears over global oil supplies pushing up crude prices to an 18-month high.
Although Syria is not a significant oil producer, there are fears for the stability of the wider Middle East, which produces about a third of the world's oil.
"If Syria becomes drawn out and becomes a long-term issue, it's going to show up in things like gas prices,'' said Chris Costanzo, an investment officer with Tanglewood Wealth Management.
As well as the rise in Brent crude, the price of US crude jumped $3.09 to close at $109.01 a barrel.
'Worst-case scenario'

The fears of a strike follow reports of a suspected chemical attack last week near the Syrian capital, Damascus, which reportedly killed more than 300 people.

On Tuesday, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said that American forces are "ready" to launch strikes if President Barack Obama chooses to order an attack.
President Obama is due to outline future US action on Syria in the coming days.
Analysts said that investors were concerned that the crisis may escalate and result in political and economic instability in the region.
"People worry about this becoming a worst-case scenario and turning into a regional conflict," said Bill Stone, chief investment strategist at PNC Asset Management.
On Tuesday, Germany's Dax and the French Cac 40 indexes ended down about 2.5%. In London, the FTSE 100 index closed down by 0.8%.
In the US, the Dow Jones fell 1.1% to 14,776.13, a two-month low.
Meanwhile, gold which is traditionally seen as a safe haven in times of uncertainty, rose $27 to $1,420 an ounce.
Risk premium
 The Middle East contains some of the world's biggest oil producers, along with some important shipping routes.

Even before the latest developments in Syria, analysts were forecasting higher oil prices, partly because of supply disruptions.

Libya, one of the Arab world's biggest oil producers, has seen its production drop by nearly 60% due to strikes and security concerns.
Analysts said the uncertainty over developments in Syria had added to the worries of oil supplies from the region.
"As the rhetoric ratchets up around Syria, the geopolitical risk premium in the price of oil is once again widening," said Dominick Chirichella, of Energy Management Institute.
Goldman Sachs has raised its short-term forecast for the oil price to $115 a barrel.

Brent Crude Oil Futures

$/barrel

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Japan's ANA to buy 49% in Myanmar's Asian Wings Airways: Source

by Straits Times

TOKYO (REUTERS) - Japan's ANA Holdings Inc will buy a 49 percent stake in Myanmar carrier Asian Wings Airways as part of a strategy to expand overseas by investing in airline related businesses, an industry source familiar with the agreement said.

ANA, will pay 3 billion yen (S$38.81 million) for the stake, the Nikkei business daily reported earlier. The two carriers may announce the deal later on Tuesday, the source said on condition he was not identified.

Yangon-based Asian Wings, which began flying in 2011, operates three turboprop ATR 72 regional aircraft and one Airbus A321 on domestic flights in Myanmar. The airline plans to begin international service in October with a flight between Yangon and Chiang Mai, Thailand, the Nikkei said.

A spokesman for the Japanese carrier declined to comment on the reports, saying it had not announced the acquisition. ANA resumed flights between Tokyo and Yangon last October after a 12-year hiatus.

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By DVB

Burma’s Union Parliament has approved a plan, recommended by President Thein Sein, to agree a US$261.5 million loan from the World Bank to support various development projects.

The 40-year loan – at a fixed 0.75 percent interest rate – would be used to develop the communications sector and to improve schools, as well as pay for the construction of a compressed natural gas and biogas power plant in Mon state’s Thaton township.

In January, the World Bank announced that it would clear Burma’s outstanding debt of some $900 million, allowing the country to reapply for grants and loans from international institutions.

Meanwhile, The Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced on Monday that it will administer a Japanese loan of $1.2 million to help Burma improve statistics collection.

The technical assistance grant from the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction aims “to strengthen institutional, strategic, and technical capacity for collecting better statistics to chart the country’s development and progress” the bank said in a statement.

“Timely, relevant, and accurate data is essential to understanding where the country [Burma] is today, and for future evidence-based decision making both within and outside government,” said Kaushal Joshi, the senior statistician with the Economics and Research Department at ADB. “Statistics help policymakers understand the economic, social, and environmental conditions, make decisions on economic growth, and design efforts to promote poverty reduction.”

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SCG budgets Bt12.4-billion for greenfield cement plant in Myanmar

THE NATION 

Siam Cement Group yesterday said it would invest Bt12.4 billion for its first integrated greenfield cement plant in Myanmar to serve the rising demand in that market.

Kan Trakulhoon, president and chief executive of SCG, said the board of directors approved the investment to construct its first fully integrated cement plant in Myanmar under that country's Foreign Investment Law. Construction is expected to begin by mid-2016. The cement plant, with annual output capacity of 1.8 million tonnes, will be strategically located in Mawlamyine, where there is a long-term supply of limestone complemented by access by boat to Yangon, Myanmar's primary commercial hub.

The plant will include a 40-megawatt power plant with the latest clean technology for internal power consumption, supporting port facilities, and other infrastructure for future expansion.

"SCG has solidified its position as one of Myanmar's market leaders in terms of dependable product attributes, brand exposure, supply-chain efficiency, and depth of distribution channels," Kan said. "The Myanmar cement market was estimated at approximately 4 million tonnes in fiscal year 2012, and is forecast to grow annually at 10 per cent over the next five years."

In fiscal 2012, SCG exported about 1.7 million tonnes of cement to Myanmar.

Kan said this project was a major investment to support growth of the cement-building-materials business in Myanmar and elsewhere in ASEAN after recent announcements that it would construct cement plants in Indonesia and Cambodia. It is in accordance with the company's strategy to become a sustainable business leader in Asean.

With a majority stake in the Myanmar plant, SCG says it places importance on sustainable development. That includes the 40MW power plant, a 9MW waste-heat generator system for reduced electrical usage, supporting port facilities, and other basic infrastructure.

SCG's stock price yesterday closed at Bt410, down by 0.97 per cent from last Friday.

Bualuang Securities yesterday noted in research that the cement, petrochemicals and building-material businesses would strengthen SCG's growth in the next few years. The growth of its cement business will be driven by rising sales revenue backed by new investment and the increasing demand in Myanmar, Cambodia and Indonesia.

Bualuang said the two new cement plants in Indonesia and Cambodia would be able to operate commercially in 2015 and the one in Myanmar in 2016.

For its building-materials business, SCG will focus more on mergers and acquisitions.

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အေရၾကီးသတင္း

ဒီေန႔ လူ႕အခြင့္အေရး ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕နဲ႔ အစည္းအေ၀း လုပ္ျဖစ္တယ္။ ျမန္မာကိုယ္စားလွယ္အဖြဲ႕က သူတို႔ကို ရွင္းလင္းတဲ့ မက္ေဆ့ခ်္တစ္ခု ေပးခဲ့တယ္။

အကယ္၍ အခ်ိဳ႕ႏုိင္ငံမ်ား (အေမရိကန္ အပါအ၀င္) က ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ား ( ႏိုင္ငံမဲ့ ျပည္သူမ်ား) ကို လက္ခံႏုိင္မည္ ဆုိပါက ကၽြႏု္ပ္တို႔ အေနျဖင့္ သေဘၤာျဖင့္ေသာ္လည္း အျခားနည္းျဖင့္ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း ပို႔ေပးမည္ ျဖစ္သည္။

ကၽြႏ္ု္ပ္တို႔ အေနျဖင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကို နားလည္ပါေသာ္လည္း ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ လံုျခံဳေရးကိုသာ ပိုမို အေလးထားပါသည္။

(ျပည္ေထာင္စုသမၼတ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတရံုး ညြန္ၾကားေရးမွဴး၏ ေဖ့စ္ဘုတ္အေကာင့္မွ အဂၤလိပ္လို ေရးသားခ်က္ကို ဘာသာျပန္ဆုိသည္။ မူလ ေရးသားေသာ စေတးတပ္စ္မွာ ေအာက္ပါအတိုင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။)

Today meeting with Human Rights Watch, Myanmar delegation gave the clear message, if some countries including US, can accept Rohinja (Stateless people), we can transport them by ships or others. We can undersatnd the human rights but we need to emphasize the National Security.

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