Asia World Company to provide electricity for Bago region

An area of Yangon city with power blackout seen this year (Photo:EMG/Myo Min Htet) Myanmar's Asia World Company has recently been granted permission to distribute electricity to 37 townships in Eastern Bago Region. Asia World Group is Myanmar’s largest and most diversified conglomerate, which interests in industrial development, construction, transportation, import-export, and a local supermarket chain. About half of Singapore’s investment...

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MoneyGram expands funds-transfer service to Myanmar via alliance

The Nation MoneyGram, a leading global money-transfer company, has announced that its international service will be available in Myanmar and will be provided through an alliance with three banks: Asia Green Development (AGD) Bank, Myanmar Citizens Bank (MCB) and Tun Foundation Bank (TFB). "We are happy to announce that we will be reaching consumers in Myanmar through our alliance with these exceptional bank agents," said Grant Lines, MoneyGram senior vice president for Asia-Pacific, South Asia and Middle East.  Its money-transfer...

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Myanmar real-estate summit to highlight infrastructure

The Nation The second Myanmar Real Estate Summit (MRES), to be held in Yangon from September 30 to October 1, will hone in on pivotal issues, critical for investing in that country's real-estate development and property sector. The sector is booming as investors respond positively to the country's economic and political reforms. Burgeoning demand and new opportunities are attracting investments from around the world.  The extent of this can be judged by the fact that Yangon enjoys the highest property prices in Southeast Asia. The...

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Myanmar housing development bank to open next month

The opening ceremony of Construction and Housing Development Bank ( Photo - EMG) The Construction and Housing Development Bank Limited (CHDB) will open its first branch within a month, according to their managing director. The bank was licensed on July 15 and aims to provide cheap housing through installment plans for low-income families, pensioners and government workers. "We are planning to open a bank branch in one month. After opening,...

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Land Prices Soar in Muse As New Zone Attracts Chinese, Burmese Investors

RANGOON — Chinese and Burmese businessmen have been rushing to buy up land in a new economic zone in the border town of Muse, northern Shan State, causing local land prices to skyrocket, according to residents, who claim that prices have topped US$200,000 per acre. “This is a big project and Chinese people really like it. Every day, many people from PRC [People’s Republic of China] come to purchase lands from that project zone. Generally,...

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Golden Return: Serge Pun Constructs A Real-Estate Empire In Myanmar

This story appears in the September 2, 2013 issue of Forbes Asia.      The road to Star City is a rutted two-lane highway that threads past the ragtag outskirts of Yangon, crosses two rusted bridges and ends, almost an hour later, at a slick showroom on a grassy riverbank. A roadside billboard welcomes me to “A Model City of Tomorrow.” After a bumpy ride in monsoon rains the real estate showroom comes as a relief and something of a mystery. As a salesman clicks on interactive screens showing condominium designs and floor plans,...

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Japanese firm to invest in Myanmar agribusiness

                                        Fruits displayed at a Megumi No Sato store (Photo - Megumi No Sato)   Japan-based Megumi No Sato will join hands with Myanmar's City Mart Holding Company, to produce and sell vegetables and fruits, according...

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Rice exports down but annual forecast positive

By THIKE ZIN (DVB)Burma exported some 200,000 tonnes of rice between April and July, but that’s 100,000 tonnes short of last year’s figures.According to the chairman of the Myanmar Rice and Paddy Traders Association, the 50 percent decrease in shipments is due to an increase in the Burmese rice price, a decrease in Indian prices, and adverse weather conditions.The price per tonne for low-quality Emata rice (25 percent broken) in Rangoon today...

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ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ ဆင္းကတ္ ေစ်းႏႈန္းမ်ား ဆက္တိုက္က်ဆင္း လာေသာ္လည္း ေလွ်ာက္ထားသူ က်ဆင္းျခင္း မရွိ

Wednesday, 28 August 2013 ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ ဆင္းကတ္ ေစ်းႏႈန္းမ်ားမွာ ဆက္တိုက္ က်ဆင္းလ်က္ ရွိေသာ္လည္း ရပ္ကြက္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး ႐ံုးမ်ားတြင္ ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ ဆင္းကတ္ ေလွ်ာက္ထားသူမ်ား ပိုမို မ်ားျပားလာေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ရပ္ကြက္ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမွဴး ႐ံုးမ်ားတြင္ ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ ဆင္းကတ္ ေလွ်ာက္ထားၾကသူ အမ်ားစုမွာလည္း ေငြက်ပ္ ၁၅ဝဝ တန္ ဆင္းကတ္ မဲေပါက္ပါက ကိုင္ေဆာင္ အသံုးျပဳရန္ မဟုတ္ဘဲ ျပန္လည္ ေရာင္းခ်ရန္ အတြက္ ေလွ်ာက္ထားျခင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။...

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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. ...

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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...

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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...

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By DVBBurma’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,...

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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...

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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...

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Thai companies urged to invest in Myanmar 'or miss out'

PETCHANET PRATRUANGKRAI THE NATION MANDALAY, MYANMAR THAI enterprises should not delay when considering business and trade opportunities with Myanmar, otherwise they may lose out to other foreign investors, said Aung Than, vice chairman to the Mandalay Chamber of Commerce in Myanmar. With the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) scheduled to commence in 2015, Aung Than said many foreign investors, particularly those from China, were already in Myanmar looking to reap benefits from the country's new openness.  "Thais are still investing...

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Ford Motor to launch auto show room in Yangon

The Ford Motor Company will launch an auto show room, spare parts and services centre in Yangon in September, according to company officials. The centre will be located in Hlaing Township, in Yangon, displaying a variety of the latest Ford cars being sold around the world. The US-based automaker is popular in Myanmar and they aim to provide first rate services to customers. The Ford will sell and distribute Sedan, SUV and trucks in for the first time. Ford Motor Company joined hands with Capital Automotive Ltd and long partner of RMA to...

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US Treasury to reach debt ceiling in mid-October

The US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has said that the country will reach its debt limit by mid-October and called on Congress to act "as soon as possible" to avoid such a situation. The government will not be able to borrow if the limit is not raised. He warned that in such a case it will be unable to meet obligations such as social security payments, military salaries and Medicare reimbursements. The country's borrowing limit is currently capped at $16.7tn (£10.7tn). "Extraordinary measures are projected to be...

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Worm fertilizer maker set to exportto Europe

Ekosol, a local company that produces organic fertilizer by using various worms, is set to begin exports to European countries next year, as its production has been making remarkable leaps forward since its foundation in 2009.Ekosol was founded in 2009 as its organic vermicompost fertilizer production doubled between 2010 and 2011 and tripled the following year, General Manager Burçin Karababa said in a recent interview with the Hürriyet Daily News. Karababa said her first encounter with the Californian red worms, which are used for producing...

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Deep-sea port to dock 300,000 tonne oil tankers on Madae Island

China has finished constructing a deep-sea port on Madae Island in Rakhine State, according to officials from the ports authority. The port will dock 300,000 tonne oil tankers as part of the Myanmar-China crude oil pipeline which is still under construction. The port was built in joint venture between China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and the Ministry of Energy. "The deep seaport is reserved for 300,000 tonne oil tankers and 26 metres deep oil tankers," said an official from the Myanmar Ports Authority. Myanmar-China pipeline...

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Myanmar to use Indian bank loans for development

Myanmar will implement several projects with loans from the Export-Import Bank of India according to a government report. The Export-Import Bank of India (EXIM Bank) has provided loans of up to US$ 500 million which will be used on infrastructure projects including communications and transport. Details were released in the Myanmar government’s 2013-2014 fiscal year report. Some of the projects include the construction of a microwave station linking the southern and northern parts of Chin State, as well as the building of power stations,...

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Microsoft Establishes Presence in Myanmar

NAYPYITAW, Myanmar –  Technology giant Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Thursday established a presence in Myanmar for the first time, forming an exclusive partnership with local firm Myanmar Information Technology as the central supplier for all of its products in the emerging market.The move represents the "first step" in Microsoft's plans for the market, with the company focusing on distributing its products rather than any manufacturing operations, Jamie Harper, president for new markets in Southeast Asia at Microsoft, said in an interview...

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Burma readmitted to EU trade scheme

By AFP & DVBThe European Union on Wednesday readmitted Burma to its trade preference scheme, saying it wanted to support reform in the once pariah state through economic development.Burma’s membership of the scheme was withdrawn in 1997 due to concerns over the use of forced labour under the then-military junta.But the EU said the International Labour Organisation had last year reported “necessary improvements” to labour practices in Burma, which was formerly known as Burma.The Irish presidency of the EU and the president of the European...

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Burma to give central bank more autonomy

Burma is set to enact a new law in the coming days giving greater independence to its central bank, officials said Wednesday, in the latest economic reform aimed at enticing foreign investors. The new legislation was approved by lawmakers on Monday and is expected to be signed into law by President Thein Sein by this weekend, although the details have not yet been made public. “The significant thing is that the central bank will be an independent body and will not be under the finance and revenue ministry anymore,” a central bank official...

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Myanmar Stock Exchange To Launch After Security Exchange Law Passed

International Business Times By Sophie Song Myanmar will have its own stock exchange soon, according to the country’s deputy minister for finance and revenue, Maung Maung Thein. Preparations and implementations for the market are already underway. “Earlier we planned to begin in 2015, but it would be too late. So, we are beginning this year,” said Thein, according to Mizzima, a Myanmar news portal based in India. To establish the stock exchange, the Central Bank of Myanmar is cooperating with the Daiwa Institute of Research Group, a leading...

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ကိုးႏိုင္ငံ စီးပြားေရး သံမွဴးမ်ားႏွင့္ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္၍ လယ္ယာထြက္ကုန္ သီးႏွံမ်ား ေရာင္းခ်ႏိုင္ဟုဆို

မႏၲေလးၿမဳိ႕ေတာ္ရွိ လယ္ယာထြက္ကုန္ သီးႏွံမ်ား ျပည္ပသို႔ တိုက္႐ိုက္ တင္ပို႔ ေရာင္းခ်ႏိုင္ေရးအတြက္ ႏိုင္ငံေပါင္း ကိုးႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ခန္႔အပ္ထားေသာ စီးပြားေရး သံမွဴးမ်ားႏွင့္ ခ်ိတ္ဆက္ ေဆာင္႐ြက္ႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ကုန္သြယ္မႈ ျမႇင့္တင္ေရး ဦးစီးဌာန ညႊန္ၾကားေရးမွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးတိုးေအာင္ျမင့္ က ေျပာၾကား သည္။ မႏၲေလး ကုန္စည္ဒိုင္ႏွင့္ ဆန္စပါး ကုန္စည္ဒိုင္တြင္ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၂၄ ရက္ေန႔ နံနက္ပိုင္းက က်င္းပသည့္ ကုန္သြယ္မႈ ျမႇင့္တင္ေရး ေဆာင္႐ြက္ေနမႈ မ်ား ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ ၎က အထက္ပါအတိုင္း ထည့္သြင္း ေျပာၾကား သြားေၾကာင္း အဆိုပါပြဲ တက္ေရာက္သူမ်ားထံမွ သိရသည္။ ေဟာင္ေကာင္၊ ဂ်ပန္၊...

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Greece 'may need 10bn euros more' in aid - Stournaras

Greece may need a third bailout but would not accept new austerity measures, the Greek finance minister has said. Yannis Stournaras said: "If there is need for further support to Greece, it will be in the order of about 10bn euros (£8.6bn; $13.4bn), or much smaller than the previous programmes." Greece has already received two bailouts totalling about 240bn euros. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel has warned about writing down any more Greek debt. Germany's chancellor said a so-called haircut of Greek debt would be bad for...

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လာမည့္ႏႇစ္မႇစ၍ ဘတ္ဂ်က္ေရးဆြဲရာတြင္ လူထုအေျချပဳ ဘတ္ဂ်က္အျဖစ္ ေျပာင္းလဲသြားမည္ျဖစ္ၿပီး ျပည္နယ္/တိုင္း ဘတ္ဂ်က္ပမာဏ ပိုမိုမ်ားျပားလာမည္

ေက်းလက္ေဒသ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရး အတြက္ လာမည့္ ၂၀၁၄-၂၀၁၅ ျမန္မာ ႏုိင္ငံ၏ ဘတ္ဂ်က္ အသုံးျပဳမႈကို လူထုအေျချပဳ ဘတ္ဂ်က္အျဖစ္ ျပဳလုပ္မည္ျဖစ္ရာ ျပည္နယ္/တုိင္းေဒသႀကီး ဘတ္ဂ်က္သည္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ဘတ္ဂ်က္ထက္ ပိုမုိႀကီးမားမည္ဟု သမၼတ႐ုံး၀န္ႀကီးဌာန ျပည္ ေထာင္စု၀န္ႀကီး ဦးစုိးသိန္းက ေျပာၾကားသည္။ ၾသဂုတ္ ၂၅ ရက္က ရန္ကုန္ ၿမိဳ႕ရႇိ Myanmar Peace Center တြင္ က်င္းပခဲ့သည့္ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ သမၼတ၏ ေက်းလက္ေဒသ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရးစီမံကိန္းအတြက္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု အစိုးရအဖြဲ႕ ၀န္ႀကီးမ်ားႏႇင့္ INGO မ်ား၊ NGO မ်ားမႇ တာ၀န္ရႇိသူမ်ား၊ ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတြင္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု၀န္ႀကီး ဦးစိုးသိန္းက ယခုကဲ့သုိ႔...

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Environmental impacts of Thilawa project informed to locals

Thilawa SEZ Management Committee organized a meeting on August 23 to inform the local residents about possible consequences of the first phase of Thilawa Special Economic Zone Project. Located in Thanlyin Township of Yangon suburb, Thilawa Special Economic Zone Project is a joint venture between Myanmar and Japanese governments. Japan-based Nippon Koei Company and Resource and Environment Myanmar are together conducting the environmental and social impact assessments [EIA/SIA] of Thilawa project. A team of the representatives have explained...

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Myanmar plans to implement two new deep seaport projects

Myanmar is planning to construct another two new deep seaports in the Tanintaryi coast and Ayeyarwady region, according to Myanmar Port Authority (MPA). Thailand is interested to construct Kalargote deep seaport project located between Mawlamyaing and Yay in Tanintaryi coast. Singapore is also interested to invest at Ngayokekaung deep seaport located at Ngayokekaung Bay in Ayayarwady region. Emerald Grand Hotel Group from Thailand and Super Axis Development Pte Ltd. from Singapore have signed MoU with the MPA in this month to analyse...

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Effectively regulating tax is vital to controlling rising land prices in Myanmar, finance deputy minister said at a press conference in Nay Pyi Taw on August 23.

Effectively regulating tax is vital to controlling rising land prices in Myanmar, finance deputy minister said at a press conference in Nay Pyi Taw on August 23. “Actually, land prices increase because people buy and sell lands as if they are gambling. Myanmar has just started to develop and so people want to do some gambling. That gambling spirit cannot be easily stopped. We are trying to give a vent for the gambling spirit, and that is to establish the stock exchange. The stock exchange is a decent place for people,” said Mr Maung Maung...

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ျမ၀တီစက္မႈဇုန္ တည္ေဆာက္ေရးအတြက္ ေျမေနရာမ်ား စတင္ေဖာ္ထုတ္

ျမ၀တီစက္မႈဇုန္ တည္ေဆာက္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းခြင္ တစ္ေနရာ ျမ၀တီၿမိဳ႕ နယ္စပ္ကုန္သြယ္ေရး စခန္းအနီးတြင္ ျမ၀တီ စက္မႈဇုန္အတြက္ ေျမေနရာ ေဖာ္ထုတ္ျခင္း လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား စတင္ေဆာင္ရြက္ ေနၿပီျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ ျမ၀တီနယ္စပ္ ကုန္သြယ္ေရးဇုန္ႏွင့္ ရြာသစ္ေက်းရြာၾကားရွိ ေျမဧကမ်ားအနက္ ညီေနာင္ဦး ကုမၼဏီ လီမိတက္မွ ေျမဧက ၁၅၀ တို႔အား ျမ၀တီစက္မႈဇုန္ တည္ေဆာက္ေရး စီမံကိန္းအျဖစ္ ေျမကြက္ေဖာ္ထုတ္ျခင္း လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို မတ္လမွစ၍ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။ "အခု...

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Singapore developers eye buyers inMyanmar

Singapore's biggest real estate developer, Far East Organization, is shifting the focus of its promotions in Myanmar from residential to commercial spaces. At a property and sales exhibition, held August 17-18 at Yangon’s Parkroyal Hotel – its 14th in Myanmar since 2010 – the company pitched Singapore as a good match for Myanmar property investors looking for business properties. “In the past, we mostly brought residential projects, but this time we’ve chosen projects preferred by Myanmar buyers, like commercial warehouses … and office...

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German budget surplus increases

news europe Higher taxes have boosted public finances in Germany which according to official data released today had a budget surplus of 0.6 percent of GDP in this year's first half . The Federal Statistical Office, Destatis, said that Germany, Europe's biggest economy, ran a surplus of 8.5 billion euros in the January-June period. That's a slightly better performance than in...

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Irish taxpayers have paid €220m forEU and IMF bailout services

Taxpayers in Ireland have paid more than €220m in fees to the EU and the IMF in the context of the country’s bailout, besides €1.4bn in interest payments paid last year alone, according to the Irish newspaper, The Independent. The fees, covering services including administration, are charged whenever the Irish government receives a loan or tranche under the €67bn programme. According to the figures published in the newspaper, between 2010 and 2012, Ireland paid about €224m worth of fees. The Irish debt-management agency, the National...

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YCDC block the construction of high-rise buildings near historic pagoda

Yangon City Development Committee (YCDC) has blocked two separate proposals to construct 11 and 22-storey buildings inside of the restricted areas near Shwedagon Pagoda. The locations of the restricted areas situated between Damazedi Road and Shin Saw Pu Road on the north ward of Shwedagon Pagoda, between the junction of Min Ye Kyaw Swar Road-Circular Train Road-Shwedagon Pagoda Road and Yaw Min Gyi Street on the south ward of Shwedagon Pagoda, Alan Pya Pagoda Road-Zoological Garden Street-Kan Street-Kan Street-Netmauk Road-Kabaaye Pagoda...

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Myanmar eyeing possibility of building new deep-sea port

The Myanmar government will jointly perform a feasibility study with a private company from Thailand to explore the possibility of building a new deep-sea port in the country's southeastern Mon State facing the Gulf of Moattama, state media reported Friday. The Port Authority of the Ministry of Transport recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Thailand's Emerald Grand Hotel Co. to start conducting, within three months, the feasibility study for the Kalargote deep-sea port project located between Ye and Mawlamyine...

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Qatari firm vows 'affordable' mobile access for Myanmar

Qatari telecoms giant Ooredoo on Friday pledged to introduce "affordable" phone services to Myanmar next year as it pumps $15 billion into one of the world's few remaining frontier mobile markets. The firm, which in June along with Norway's Telenor won bids to provide mobile coverage to a nation where less than 10 percent of the population has telephone access, should be formally awarded its 15-year 3G licence by the end of this year. It will then start to roll out its mobile services -- including money transfers and weather data...

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