Business blog

Bank of Ireland updates

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Bank of Ireland, one of the country’s three retail banks, is losing its chief financial officer after a pay cap introduced in the wake of the financial crisis prevented it from matching a salary offer from another company.

Myles O’Grady joined the bank in June 2019 and has been CFO since October that year. He is leaving next March to join an as yet undisclosed company outside the financial sector, the bank said in a statement.

Following Ireland’s 2008

German election updates

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Germans have started going to the polls in a historic election that will decide who succeeds Angela Merkel as chancellor of Europe’s biggest economy.

Polls published in recent days suggested that the result of Sunday’s contest would be too close to predict, with the centre-right CDU/CSU eating into the lead of the left-of-centre Social Democrats. A large proportion of voters remain undecided.

The SPD has been polling at about 25-26 per cent, ahead of the CDU/CSU at 22-25 per cent, the

Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer who has been held in Vancouver for almost three years on criminal fraud charges, walked free on Friday after reaching a deal with US prosecutors, while two Canadians detained in China shortly after her arrest were allowed to return home.

A Canadian judge ordered Meng’s release after US prosecutors announced a deferred prosecution agreement during a federal court hearing in Brooklyn before Judge Ann Donnelly. Meng, 49, attended the hearing by video.

US authorities had sought to extradite Meng from Canada to face bank and wire fraud charges, alleging she misled banks into processing

Chinese corruption updates

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One of the world’s biggest booze barons, who steered the growth of Mao Zedong’s favourite firewater to surpass the value of Coca-Cola, has been jailed for life in China.

The downfall of Yuan Renguo, the former chair of Kweichow Moutai, the premium maker of baijiu, is a stark reminder of Xi Jinping’s relentless crackdown on corruption. The sentencing also underscores the risks faced by Chinese business elites as Xi orchestrates an unparalleled overhaul of the country’s business landscape.

Yuan left the

Afghanistan updates

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China has called for economic sanctions on Afghanistan to be lifted and the Taliban to be given access to billions of dollars in frozen foreign exchange reserves, highlighting a deepening rift between Beijing and the west over the future of the country.

“Afghanistan’s foreign exchange reserves are national assets. They belong to the people and should be used for the people,” China’s foreign ministry said in a statement, citing remarks made by Wang Yi, the country’s foreign minister, at a virtual meeting of

Evergrande Real Estate Group updates

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Chinese markets fell on their first day of trading this week after a public holiday as concerns grew in global markets over a possible default by property developer Evergrande on an international bond repayment.

But the losses were not as heavy as feared after the real estate company, which has total liabilities of more than $300bn, said payment due on Thursday for an onshore renminbi-denominated bond had “already been resolved through off-exchange negotiations”.

The benchmark CSI 300