India clinch Asia Cup T20 title

BUSINESS | 23 SPORT | 31

QDB and Maersk Oil in deal to

develop SMEs

www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani getting off the plane at the Saparmurat Turkmenbashi International Airport in Ashgabat yesterday. The Emir is on a two-day state visit to Turkmenistan. He was welcomed upon arrival, along with the accompanying delegation, by Turkmenistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov, Qatar’s Ambassador Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Suwaidi and Turkmenistan’s envoy to Qatar Charyev Orazmuhammet Atajanovich.

Emir begins Turkmenistan visit

MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016 • 27 Jumada I 1437 • Volume 20 • Number 6728 thepeninsulaqatar @peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatar

Emir congratulates

Ghana President

DOHA: Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani sent yesterday a cable of congratulations to Presi-dent of the Republic of Ghana John Dramani Mahama on the occasion of his country’s Independence Day.

By Mohammad Shoeb

The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Fuel Company (Woqod) has announced the opening of several specialised car mainte-nance service facilities inside Doha in collaboration with some leading car dealers.

“We are going to develop stan-dalone full car maintenance service facilities at Woqod petrol stations wherever space is available,”, Ibra-him Jaham Al Kuwari, CEO of Woqod told The Peninsula yesterday on the sidelines of the company’s Annual General Meeting.

“The total number of centres have not been decided yet. We are going to start with three big players such as Toyota, Nissan and Mercedes. These facilities will be a joint venture project between Woqod and the spe-cific car dealers,” Al Kuwari added.

The design of these centres are currently undergoing a lot of devel-opments. But if everything goes as

per the plan then it will start with at least three facilities by the end of this year.

These facilities will be sepa-rate entities located along Woqod petrol stations wherever they can be accommodated. These brand-dedicated service centres will be providing full services of all leading cars manufacturers, including Ford, GMC and all major Japanese brands.

The investment cost of each centres is expected to vary from company to company depending on the size of the facility. But the esti-mated cost of an ideal service centre would be over QR50m.

The names and locations of these proposed centres have not been dis-closed, but according, to Al Kuwari, they will be a carrying the names of Woqod as well as the name of a par-ticular car brand.

“We are working to further tight-ening agreements with more car dealers. Japanese car dealers such as Toyota, Nissan and others are more aggressive for establishing such cen-tres”, he added.

“As these centres will be built in different parts of Doha for leading car dealers, the car owners, instead of going to industrial area, will get full maintenance services with great comfort and ease.”

The company is in the final stage of giving the full study to its Board of Directors for their approval. Once the plan is approved, the develop-ment work will soon start at various locations.

→ Continued on page 2

By Sidi Mohamed

The Peninsula

D0HA: The second edition of the Goût de France ( Good France) will be held on March 21 to promote the French cuisine. The event is being held inspired by the success of the last edition.

Announcing details about the event, the French Ambassador to Qatar, Eric Chevallier, said yes-terday that more than 1,500 chefs from across the f ive continents will be participating in the event, and providing 1500 “French –style dinners”.

“This is part of a global event organised at the initiative of the famous French Chef, Alain Ducasse,

and The French Ministry of foreign Affairs,” the ambassador said. He was addressing a press conference at his residence and present were several celebrated chefs representing some eight famous restaurants.

Over 100,000 people and representatives from 1,300 restau-rants from across the world had taken part in the last edition of the French food festival, in addition

to French embassies from around the world”.

The French Embassy in Doha is also contributing to the “Good France” event along with eight restaurants here, in which tribute will be paid to one French cuisine which is vibrant, open and innovative, he added.

In 2010, the Unesco had considered the French cuisine as an international and humanitarian heritage, Chevallier

said replying to a question from this newspaper. In the words of the famous Chef Alain Ducasse: “French cuisine is the interpreter of a cuisine that has evolved towards lightness in harmony with its environment, and the com-mon point of this event is generosity, sharing and the love for what is beau-tiful and testes good”.

→ See also page 7

Reuters

HILLA, IRAQ: A truck bomb at an Iraqi checkpoint south of Bagh-dad killed at least 60 people and wounded more than 70 yester-day, medical and security officials said, and Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the blast.

The suicide attack, involving an explosive-laden fuel tanker, is the second deadliest this year after one on February 28 that killed 78 people in Sadr City, a Shia district of Baghdad. This was also claimed by the ultra-hardline Sunni group that controls vast swathes of terri-tory in Iraq and in Syria.

The escalation in IS bombings suggests that Iraqi government forces are being stretched thin after their recent gains against the group in the western and northern provinces.

Responsibility for the bombing in Hilla, 117km south of Baghdad, was claimed in a posting on the website of the Amaq news agency, which supports Islamic State.

“A martyr’s operation with a truck bomb hit the Babylon Ruins checkpoint at the entrance of the city of Hilla, killing and wound-ing dozens,” the statement on the Amaq website said.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Law-enforcement agencies have arrested many people involved in luring housemaids to escape their sponsors.

Some 112 maids were prompted to run away from the households that

employed them, says a senior Minis-try of Interior official.

During inspection drives, many foreign workers were caught last year who were found violating Law No. 4 of 2009 regulating entry, exit and stay of foreign workers in Qatar.

Many workers were repatriated home last year for different crimes, said Brigadier Nasser Al Sayed.

Director of Search and Follow-Up Department (S&FD) of the Ministry of Interior, Al Sayed said some 5,440 companies and 3,460 individual sponsors were blacklisted in 2015 for violating the provisions of Law No 4 of 2009. They will not be allowed to hire fresh workers anymore as punish-ment, he said in remarks to Al Sharq. Their workers had lodged complaints

against them and those complaints were verified.

Replying to questions about illegal visa trade, he said the crime has been on a decline. In 2013, for instance, 184 companies were caught which were accused of involvement in visa-related rackets.

→ Continued on page 4

Woqod to open maintenance centres for cars

Many arrested for helping maids escape

The Peninsula

DOHA: With a rapid increase in the number of people using pri-mary healthcare services, a major expansion in the facilities is on the anvil in the Western region of the country that comprises a large geographical area.

The new appointment system through the Wayyak telephone service has helped organise the functioning of health centres and improve performance.

However, about 30% of the patients who have appointments fail to turn up, said Dr Hiyam Ali

Al Sada, director of the Western Region at the Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC).

Five new health centers will be set up in the region in the next few years which will add to the existing seven centers, Al Sada told Qatar News Agency (QNA).

Of these, two new health cen-tres will open in Al Wajbah and Muaither by the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

A new health center in Al Waab will also open next year while new health centers are planned in Bani Hajar and Ain Khalid in future.

→ Continued on page 4

Over 1,500 chefs to participate in Gout de France

Five health centres to be set up in western region

Specialised centres, in collaboration with leading big players such as Toyota, Nissan and Mercedes, will start by the end of this year.

IS truck bomb in Baghdad kills 60

DOHA: Qatar Science and Tech-nology Park (QSTP) through its member companies has con-tributed 91 patents to the global technology market, a senior offi-cial has said.

QSTP’s Managing Director Hamad Al Kuwari said: “QSTP serves as the hub for applied research, innovation, and entrepreneurship to reach com-mercialisation of viable technology projects in Qatar. We are thrilled to announce that, through our mem-ber-companies, who have so far contributed 91 patents to the glo-bal technology market. I would like to use this opportunity to extend my gratitude to our esteemed member-companies who have been working diligently to make these unparalleled developments possible.”

QSTP adds 91

patents to market

Sheikha Mayassa

opens auction

house at KataraDOHA: H E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Chairperson of Qatar Museums, yesterday opened Dar Al Bahi auction house at Katara Cultural Village, featur-ing several priceless paintings and art works on Islamic and ori-ental art.

These items will be auc-tioned first time in Qatar in April. Sheikha Al Mayassa later toured the facility accompanied by Sheikh Abdul Rahman bin Hamad Al Thani, CEO of Qatar Media Corporation and Dr Kha-lid bin Ibrahim Al Sulaiti, director general of Katara.

H E Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Chairperson of Qatar Museums, at the Dar Al Bahi auction house at Katara Cultural Village, yesterday.

Emir H H Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani met Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security Teo Chee Hean and his delegation at the Emiri Diwan yesterday. Talks dealt with relations between both countries, means of enhancing them and issues of mutual interest in the economic and investment sectors. Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani was present.

Emir meets Singapore Deputy PM

HOME02 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

QNA

DOHA: Deputy Emir H H Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani yesterday sent a cable of congrat-ulations to Ghana President John Dramani Mahama on his country’s Independence Day.

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani sent a similar congratulatory cable to the president.

Rowing descentexercise alertDOHA: The General Command of the Armed Forces yesterday said the Internal Security (Lekhwiya) will perform today a rowing descent at the height of 10 metres at Lekhwiya Camp from 7.15am to 9.15am. It called on visitors to the area to take precautions for safety.

Qatar to attend UN meetDOHA: Qatar will attend the four-day 47th Session of the United Nations Statistical Commission at the UN headquarters in New York City from tomorrow. Minister of Development Planning and Statis-tics H E Dr Saleh Mohamed Salem Al Nabit will lead a delegation to the meeting. Last year, Qatar was elected Representative of the Asian Group, which enabled it to obtain membership of the UBN Statistical Commission for 2016-2019.

QNA

DOHA: Prime Minister and Inte-rior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani

attended the opening of the Second Doha International Conference to discuss the problems of the deaf and blind (dual disability) at Doha Mar-riott Hotel yesterday. The three-day event is organised by Arab Union for the Blind.

Senior officials, heads of diplo-matic missions, representatives of civil society organisations and gov-ernments and experts from Qatar, Arab and foreign countries and World Federation of the Deafblind are tak-ing part.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Ooredoo has donated QR200,000 to support Educate A Child (EAC), a programme of Educa-tion Above All Foundation (EAA).

A cheque was given at a special ceremony this week and will be used for EAC projects in support of chil-dren around the world with no access to primary education due to poverty, conflicts or natural disasters.

Ooredoo raised the money from entry fees for races during Ooredoo Marathon 2016 in January and con-tributions from its central charity fund.

Founded in 2012 by H H Sheikha

Moza bint Nasser, EAA aims to build a global movement that contributes to human, social and economic develop-ment through the provision of quality education.

Under the mandate, the EAC pro-gramme aims to provide access to quality primary education to out- of-school children in regions suffering due to poverty, conflicts and natural disasters.

Through its partnerships to date, EAC has commitments in place to enrol six million children.

Fatima Sultan Al Kuwari, Direc-tor, Community and Public Relations, Ooredoo, said: “We are pleased and proud to provide the donation to sup-port EAC, recognising the incredible

work they do around the world. “Ooredoo believes in the power

of education to transform people’s lives, and we are working hard on programmes that deploy innovative mobile technology to bring educa-tional resources to under-served and remote communities.

“We thank everyone who ran the Ooredoo Marathon for their contribution.”

Leena Al Derham, Senior Educa-tion Specialist, EAC, said: “Ooredoo is a valuable partner and on behalf of EAC and EAA, we would like to thank Ooredoo for its support and envision this to be the beginning of collabora-tions with the company in support of out-of-school children.”

Ooredoo donates QR200,000 to

support Educate A Child programme

Officials at the event.

QNA

DOHA: The Qatar-Singapore High Level Joint Committee yesterday held a meeting under the chairmanship of Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani.

Singapore’s Deputy Prime Min-ister Teo Chee Hean headed his delegation at the meeting at the Emiri Diwan.

Both sides discussed cooperation

between the two countries and means of enhancing them in the eco-nomic and investment fields.

They also exchanged views on regional and international issues of joint interest.

The Premier and Singapo-rean Deputy Premier witnessed the signing of three memorandums of understanding — on coopera-tion in the legal field between both governments; cooperation in the education field between Qatar’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education and the Ministry of Edu-cation in Singapore; and cooperation and exchange in the field of devel-opment and capacity-building of government officials and leaders of the sector between Qatar Leadership Centre and the Civil Service College in Singapore.

The Premier and the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore also witnessed the signing of minutes of the joint statement of the meet-ing in which both sides underlined their commitment to continue the work of the panel as the major pil-lar of cooperation between the two

countries. They welcomed the devel-opment of relations as each side has been cooperating in various fields since the first meeting of the com-mittee in October 2006, particularly economic cooperation, training in the fields of civil service and urban planning, cooperation in the fields of security, civil defence, informa-tion technology and communications and the legal field.

The two sides welcomed the signing of a memorandum of under-standing on cooperation in the legal field, between Qatar’s Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Law in Singapore. They also welcomed the renewal of an MoU on cooperation and exchange in the field of capac-ity- building of officials and leaders of the sector between Qatar Lead-ership Centre and the Civil Service College in Singapore.

They agreed to hold the com-mittee’s next meeting in Singapore at a date to be set later through dip-lomatic channels. The Premier also hosted a luncheon banquet in hon-our of the Singaporean Deputy Prime Minister and his delegation.

The Peninsula

DOHA: The draft Code on Premium Rate Services being prepared by the Communications Regulatory Author-ity (CRA) proposes a new obligation on service providers to ensure that consumers have expressly agreed to receive a service before they are charged for that service.

The draft Codes are expected to be finalized in the coming months after both service providers - Oore-doo and Vodafone Qatar – have provided their comments.

The draft Codes are a result of continuous monitoring of reports in the media and many complaints received by CRA from consumers about being charged for services that they have never requested or received.

CRA has launched an industry consultation on draft Codes on spam and premium rate services.

Through these draft Codes CRA intends to give specific guidance to service providers on issues that are common sources of concern for consumers, CRA said in a statement yesterday.

Service providers already have a range of consumer protection obli-gations under existing regulations. The draft Codes add to these in ways that are intended to reduce com-plaints about spam and premium rate services.

“Most of the consumer com-plaints we receive are related to premium services, consumer’s ina-bility to unsubscribe, spam and scam, among others.

“Through these two draft Codes,

CRA intends to empower consum-ers in Qatar to have full control of the services and messages they want to receive,” said Amel Salem Al Hanawi, Consumer Affairs Depart-ment Manager.

“These Codes will further enhance CRA’s consumer protection efforts together with the existing ini-tiatives and regulatory instruments. The final documents will be made available to the consumers and other stakeholder in the CRA website,” she added.

Some key consumer protection initiatives towards consumer protec-tion spearheaded by CRA include: A Consumer Protection Policy which includes a strengthened system for monitoring and enforcing compli-ance with the rules, and provision for a dispute resolution process that is independent of operators.

A dedicated telecom consumers complaint hotline (103) operational 24-hour; an independent complaints process, which consumers can con-tact if they are dissatisfied with the way their service provider has treated their complaint; a Code on Advertising, Marketing and Brand-ing to monitor advertisements and promotions of communications products and services; and mobile app — Arsel

Consumers can contact CRA if they are first unable to resolve their disputes with their service provider within 30 days using a variety of communication channels: The 24/7 hotline number 103, email at con-sumervoice@cra.gov.qa, using the CRA’s online complaint form, by tweeting directly to @CRAqatar, or by visiting CRA’s headquarters at Al Nasr Tower B, Corniche.

Qatar and Singapore sign cooperation agreementsThe Premier and Singapore’s Deputy Premier attend the high-level joint committee meeting and witness the signing of several MoUs.

PM attends global forum on dual disability

Prime Minister and Interior Minister H E Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani with other officials at the Second Doha International Conference on the deaf and blind (dual disability).

Greeting cables sent to Ghana President

Continued from page 1

Asked about developing more fuel stations, especially in some underserved areas, such as Al Cor-niche Street and F-Ring Road, he said Woqod has submitted a ‘mas-ter plan’ to concerned authorities which trying hard to provide right locations.

“In some areas such as Cor-niche it is difficult to find appropriate

space to establish a fuel station,” he said.

“So we are looking forward to developing some back streets which can be easily accessed by traffic along Corniche Road and similar critical locations,” Al Kuwari added.

He said Woqod is going to open some 18-20 additional fuels stations in strategic areas across the coun-try to ease the rush at existing petrol stations.

Engineer Ibrahim Jaham Al Kuwari,CEO, Woqod, speaking at the event. Pic: Salim / The Peninsula

Woqod to open 18-20 petrol stations in strategic areas

Draft Code on Premium

Rate Services under way

HOME 03 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

By Fazeena Saleem

The Peninsula

DOHA: The third annual Great British Festival Qatar 2016 has officially opened in celebration of culture, education, tour-ism and business, with special events marking the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.

The festival was opened by British Ambassador Ajay Sharma, with Dar-wish Ahmed, Director, Marketing and International Affairs, Katara Cultural Village, which is cultural partner for the celebration. The festival until March 19 in partnership with British Council fea-tures everything from traditional British spring fetes to a football tournament and activities in hotels.

“I am proud to launch the festival, which promises to be the most enjoya-ble yet. It provides a platform for both countries to forge partnerships in com-merce, tourism, culture, education and science. I encourage residents in Qatar to get involved over the next fortnight

and enjoy some of the superb activities on offer,” said Sharma.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company will perform all his plays in 97 minutes on March 11; the movie Much Ado About Nothing, arguably the best film adaption of Shakespeare, will be screened on March 15, Qatar’s Philharmonic Orchestra will play a selection of famous music inspired by Shakespeare to close the festival on March 19. The full programme and ticket details can be viewed at https:llwww.facebook.com/britfestga/or find out more about the festival on Twitter or Instagram by following the handle @britfestqa.

To highlight Shakespeare’s con-tribution to the arts, Qatar Airways is offering one lucky festival participant

the opportunity to win two return flights on the new direct route to Birmingham to enjoy a Shakespeare Experience, with free accommodation.

The Great Britain campaign is the UK’s most ambitious international mar-keting event and showcases the best the country offers to encourage more people to visit, study, invest in and do business with the UK.

Prospective students are invited to visit the annual ‘Study in the UK’ exhi-bition from March 13 to 14 at La Cigale Hotel. You can register in advance to gain fast access to the event at http://ga.edukexhibition.org.

Many British researchers from Uni-versity College London in Qatar and

in partnership with Unesco, will share recent archaeological investigations about the origins of Qatar and its his-toric towns at a ‘Cafe Scientifique” event on March 17 at Museum of Islamic Art Park Cafe II.

Frank Fitzpatrick, Director, Brit-ish Council Qatar, said, “The council is delighted to again support the festi-val, in its third year. I look forward to another programme that welcomes the strength of our relationship with Qatar while creating opportunities for fur-ther collaboration and the exchange of knowledge and ideas.” Qatar Shell, Ezdan Holding Group, Park House Community Initiative and Blue Rubicon are official sponsors of the festival.

Great British Festival Qatar 2016 opens

The Peninsula

DOHA: As part of International Women’s Day, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) of Qatar Foundation (QF) is organising an event to celebrate accomplishments of leading women in Qatar and explore how women can best shape their futures.

Organised by College of Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with Doha International Family Institute (DIFI), the event ‘My Voice, My Future’ will be held tomor-row at 9am at HBKU Student Centre.

HBKU invites members of the community to attend a panel discussion featuring five female Qatari thought leaders

Dr Amal Al Malki, Founding Dean of the college, said: “The college was founded with a remit to be a catalyst in these fields, employing academia and research to the serv-ice of society. It gives me pleasure to organise this event along with DIFI. This is the first time we are celebrating International Women’s Day in an academic setting at HBKU.

“The focus of the event is to bring Qatari women to the forefront of the conversation and give them space to rep-resent themselves and their experiences. The event also brings together Qatari women from different professional backgrounds to showcase success stories and challenges faced by them and state Qatari women’s aspirations and objectives for the future.

“Qatari women are citizens of this wonderful country and share the responsibility of the present and the future, working hand-in-hand with Qatari men.”

Noor Al Jehani Al Malki, Executive Director, DIFI, and Co-organiser of the event, said, “We are delighted to collab-orate with the college in celebrating International Women’s Day. Driven by Qatar National Vision 2030 and aiming to enhance women’s capabilities and empower them to par-ticipate fully in all spheres of life, we want to highlight achievements and aspirations of younger women, while encouraging them to be proactive and take advantage of opportunities that could shape their futures.”

Panellists include Dr Kholode Al Obaidli, former vice--president, National Talent Management, Human Resources Department, Qatar Airways; Aysha Al Mudahka, CEO, Qatar Business Incubation Centre, Dr Asma Al Fadhala, Director of Research, World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE); Hanadi Al Darwish, Artist and Director, Visual Arts Centre, Ministry of Culture and Sports; and Tahani Al Hajri, Col-umnist. The event will be moderated by Reem Al Harmi, Qatari Columnist, followed by a question-answer session and a networking reception. Those interested are encour-aged to RSVP at: IMDQatar@qf.org.qa.

HBKU to celebrate accomplishments of women in Qatar

Darwish Ahmed (third left), Director, Marketing and International Affairs, Katara; and British Ambassador to Qatar Ajay Sharma (fourth left), with other officials during the opening of the third annual Great British Festival Qatar 2016 at Katara yesterday. Pic: Abdul Basit

QNA

DOHA: Camel Racing Organising Com-mittee Chairman Sheikh Hamad bin

Jassim bin Faisal Al Thani said they will organise a traditional camel-rid-ing festival next season. The panel holds three major festivals each season. The announcement follows the success of this year’s edition of the traditional camel-

riding festival. He expressed delight over the success of the festival this year and highlighted the high level of attendance by people of all ages, in addition to for-eigners and tourists visiting Qatar.

Sheikh Hamad said strong positive

reactions from citizens and foreigners to the festival encouraged the commit-tee to prepare for the event next year. He thanked the country’s leadership for sup-port and said it helped make the festival a success.

Plans to organise traditional camel-riding festival

The festival celebrates culture, education, tourism and business, with special events marking the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare.

HOME04 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Ministry of Economy and Commerce, in collaboration with Al Badi Trading & Contract-ing Co. dealer of Yamaha bikes, has announced the recall of Yamaha bikes 42F-R1/R1M models of 2015 because of an imbalance in the speed box (gear).

The ministry said the recall is within the framework of its efforts to protect consumers and ensure dealers follow up on vehi-cle defects and repairs.

The ministry said it will coor-dinate with the dealer to follow up on maintenance and repairs and communicate with customers to ensure necessary repairs are car-ried out.

It urged customers to report any violations to its Consumer Protection and Anti-Commer-cial Fraud Department through hotline: 16001; email: info@mec.gov.qa; Twitter: @MEC_Qatar; Instagram: MEC_Qatar; and the ministry’s mobile app for Android and IOS: MEC_Qatar

French-Syrianlensman to opensolo exhibition

The Peninsula

DOHA: Prominent French-Syr-ian photographer Ammar Abd Rabbo will open a solo exhibition at Katara, marking the fifth anni-versary of the Syrian Revolution as a homage to the civilians trapped in Syrian cities.

Titled “Aleppo,” the exhibi-tion will feature 31 photos that document the different aspects of everyday life in the war torn city of Aleppo: a city that is being besieged and suffers from hun-ger and shortages like the other cities of Syria. The exhibition has travelled to various cities in France including Paris, Alençon and Mandelieu. Five photographs of the show were also shown in Berlin as part of a collective exhi-bition called “My Voice Rings Out For Syria” and one of the images shown in Doha was chosen and exhibited by worldwide famous artist Banksy for his “Dismaland” project in England. Presented by Katara and the French embassy, the expo will be open from March 15 to 31 at Katara Building 22.

Yamaha bikes 42F-R1/RIM models recalled

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Second Qatar Nephrology Conference hosted by Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) discussed latest research and other developments in renal and transplantation medicine.

There are about 80 patients on the waiting list and 300 under work-up for kidney transplants in Qatar.

“The incidence and prevalence of renal diseases is on the rise all over the world, and fighting the dis-eases is a major health challenge for the future. “Chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension repre-sent the major causes of end-stage renal disease — a kidney failure so advanced that it cannot be reversed

or treated with conventional medi-cal treatments.

“Patients with the condition depend on dialysis and kidney trans-plants for survival,” said Dr Hassan Al Malki, Head, Nephrology Depart-ment, HMC, and Chairman of the conference. About 250 healthcare professionals, including leaders in the field of nephrology, attended the conference with Qatar National Bank as the main sponsor.

“The conference is part of HMC’s efforts to build capacity in Qatar and the region for the delivery of high quality preventive and therapeu-tic healthcare, which is a priority of Qatar’s National Health Strategy,” Dr Al Malki said and thanked sponsors.

QNB Group’s sponsorship is part of the Group’s efforts to support the development of healthcare and medi-cine in Qatar, and part of its corporate social responsibility programme to give back to the community in Qatar and across its international network.

QNB’s CSR programme is focused on the development of six main areas: Arts and culture; economic and international affairs; health and the environment; social and human-itarian affairs; sports; and youth and education.

The second conference builds

on the success of the first in 2013. It aimed to provide healthcare pro-fessionals in the region with an opportunity to share knowledge and expertise and foster collabo-rations with international centres that can contribute to the develop-ment of HMC’s transplant and dialysis

programmes.The event featured 15 interna-

tional speakers, including renowned kidney clinician scientist Dr Chris McIntyre from Canada; Prof Jürgen Floege, President, German Society of Nephrology; Dr Khalid Abdulmo-hsen Almeshari, Chairman, Saudi

Centre for Organ Transplantation’s National Paired Kidney Exchange Committee; Dr Peter Blake, President, North American Chapter of Interna-tional Society of Peritoneal Dialysis; and Dr Ronald J Falk, international expert in vasculitis and autoimmune kidney disease.

Dr Hassan Al Malki (third left), Head, Nephrology Department, HMC, and Chairman of the conference, with other participants and representatives of the sponsors pose for a group photo at the event.

HMC hosts second Qatar nephrology forumThere are about 80 patients on the waiting list and 300 under work-up for kidney transplants in Qatar.

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Ministry of Economy and Commerce has shut down a com-pany for a month and a pharmacy for a week for violating some provisions of the consumer protec-tion law.

The erring outlet in Al Wakrah was caught for displaying and sell-ing counterfeit products and the pharmacy in Al Aziziyah was booked for selling expired baby milk.

The closure in both cases is within the framework of inspec-tion campaigns carried out by the ministry to monitor the market and commercial activities to combat price manipula-tion and expose violations pertaining to counterfeit goods and non-conform-ance with standard specifications.

Inspectors from the ministry fined the com-pany and the pharmacy in line with Article 7 of Law No. 8 of 2008.

The law stipulates that

suppliers of goods shall clearly display on product labels a clear description of goods and their ingre-dients and refrain from posting any misleading or false statements.

The administrative closure is published on the ministry’s website as well as two daily newspapers at the offending com-pany and the pharmacy’s expense in line with Arti-cle No. 3 of the law.

The ministry said it is determined to protect consumer rights and will intensify inspection cam-paigns to crack down on violations of the law. The ministry said it will refer violators of laws and ministerial decrees to authorities, who will take action against them to protect the rights of consumers.

The ministry urged consumers to report any violations to its Consumer Protection and Anti-Com-mercial Fraud department and send complaints and suggestions through hot-line, 16001 or email info@mec.gov.qa.

Firm and pharmacy shut

down for violating

consumer protection law

The Peninsula

DOHA: To ensure the highest lev-els of customer security and data protection, Vodafone Qatar has launched a campaign to raise awareness about spam calls and messages.

Vodafone Qatar said: “Our cus-tomers may have received a call or message via WhatsApp recently from an unknown local or inter-national number informing them that they have won a cash prize from Vodafone Qatar. We assure customers that our competitions are SMS-based with the sender listed as ‘Vodafone’ or the number 97773. We will not contact customers via WhatsApp and we ask them not to answer these messages or return calls as it may be a scam. Vodafone is working to block such scams so that they do not receive them in future.” It urged customers to con-tact its Call Centre on 111 about any such numbers. Vodafone will draw information related to the number and refer it to authorities.

Continued from page 1

As for individuals who were involved as brokers in the illicit visa trade, their number totalled 1,203 in 2013.

However, the number of errant companies went down to 120 the fol-lowing year (in 2014) and the number of people found involved as brokers was a mere 75.

Last year, there was a drastic decline in both, the number of com-panies and individual brokers.

The companies numbered only five and individuals barely seven last year.

“The figures show beyond doubt that the illegal visa trade is not a problem anymore,” said Al Sayed.

He said the victims of the illicit visa trade who land here and have no jobs and nowhere to go, are helped by his department to change sponsor-ship and find jobs.

“We usually send them to compa-nies that have jobs and need workers,” said the Brigadier.

There is a special team at the S&FD that collects proof and builds cases against those involved in visa rackets, he said.

The suspects are referred to the Public Prosecution and then legal action is taken against them.

The court decides the action to be taken.

Catching runaway workers is a coordinated work and the S7FD works in close cooperation with law-enforcement agencies like Lekhwiya and Al Faza to catch the violators (of

Law No. 4.Talking about the punishment

prescribed for those who provide shelter to a runaway worker, the official said Article 51 says if proved guilty they must face a fine of up to QR50,000 or a jail term of up to three years.

However, if the person is found repeating the crime, he or she must face a jail term of a minimum of 15 days and a maximum of three years and fine ranging from QR20,000 to QR100,000 or both.

Continued from page 1

Al Rayyan health centre, one of the biggest in the region will be expanded this year because of the large turnout, Dr Al Sada added.

Al Rayyan health centre receives an average 36,000 visitors per month, while Mesaimeer and Abu Backer Siddiq health centre see an average 26,000 visitors.

Al Nakhla and Sheehania health

centres receive an average 15,000 visitors.

Health centres in less populated areas like Karana and Jameelia receive relatively less number of visitors.

Of the total patients, about 20 percent are referred to the Hamad General Hospital, especially cases needing surgery and critical care.

The E-file system has helped improve the services at health

centres. It will be implemented in Abu

Backer and Mesaimeer health cen-tres in July.

Specialized clinics has been shifted from the old building to the new one as part of expansion at Abu-backer Siddiq health centre and some new services have been added like school health services, quit smoking clinic, dermatology, minor surgery and physiotherapy.

The extended timing has already been implemented in Abu Nakhla, Sheehnaia and Mesaimeer health centres and it will be enforced in Al Rayyan and Abu backer Siddiq health centres in April and later in the remaining health centres.

Vaccination against infection dis-eases and pre-travel vaccination are available in all heath centres in the region, not only in Mesaimeer, said Dr Al Sada.

Vodafone unveils

spam calls

awareness drive

Number of errant firms dropped to 120 in 2014

Al Rayyan health centre to be expanded this year

HOME 05MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: A Qatar Red Crescent Soci-ety (QRCS) delegation visited Kenya to discuss cooperation, capacity- build-ing and promotion of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in the Afri-can continent.

Dr Aisha Yousef Al Mannai, Vice-President, QRCS; and Dr Fawzi Oussedik, Head, International Rela-tions, QRCS, were received by Dr Abbas Gullet, Secretary-General, Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS).

They visited Al Mustaqbal Uni-versity in Garissa, chaired by Dr Abbas Gullet, to explore cooperation between QRCS and KRCS, particu-larly in the promotion of IHL.

It was agreed to hold a moot court competition for law students of the university, like the one held by QRCS in Uganda. The moot court will be chaired by Dr Oussedik and man-aged by a jury of legal professors and experts.

Dr Al Mannai delivered a lecture for College of Islamic Studies students on volunteerism and humanitarian-ism, stressing the need to enforce IHL. The lecture received large attendance, who made valuable comments.

A seminar was held with the uni-versity’s faculty on their interest in voluntary work and related fields, highlighting challenges that may hinder progress.

The delegation also visited KRCS First Aid Department to review

services for society, and the Somali refugees in particular. The toured the King Faisal Hospital, the country’s central hospital funded by Saudi Ara-bia, and met some in-patients.

The team went to Lamu County, some 600km from Nairobi, to visit the KRCS branch and have an idea about its activities, especially in rela-tion to drug control.

They spoke to some rehabilitated addicts to know what services they received that helped them overcome addiction and fill their free time with useful activities.

The team then visited the Kenya-Somalia frontiers to watch difficulties facing humanitarian efforts so that future relief and development pro-grammes for the Somali refugees in Kenya can be prepared accordingly.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Airways Cargo (QAC) recently received the International Award for Excellence in Air Cargo at the Air Cargo India 2016 exhibi-tion and conference hosted by STAT Times.

Readers of STAT Times, the monthly publication covering trans-port and tourism news, rated QAC ‘highly acclaimed’ in the Interna-tional Air Cargo Airline of the Year category, a significant recognition of QAC’s emerging industry leader-ship position.

Recent customer innovations introduced by QAC include Croamis, a new shipment tracking system that allows shippers and forwarders full visibility of the transportation ribbon, which provides the latest information and real-time status of their cargo.

The world’s third-largest air cargo carrier has fully adopted the electronic air waybill, which makes the shipping process more stream-lined and efficient.

QAC continues to expand network of offerings, serving more than 50 cargo destinations.

Ulrich Ogiermann, Chief Officer Cargo, Qatar Airways (QA), said: “We appreciate the recognition for serving

our cargo customers so well. “QAC is emerging as a leader in

the air cargo world, expanding net-work and offering new products and services our customers want and need. We are investing in infrastruc-ture at Hamad International Airport to support further growth, includ-ing a new cargo terminal that will be able to handle 4.4 million tonnes of cargo per year, and we look for-ward to expanding our influence in global airfreight.”

QAC operates a fleet of eight Airbus A330Fs, eight Boeing 777 freighters and one Boeing 747 nose loader freighter. It utilises the cargo belly-hold space on QA’s passenger flights.

QA launched freighter services to Budapest, Prague and Ho Chi Minh on March 3. Belly-hold cargo capacity will also be provided on the recently launched passenger route to Sydney, and on the up and coming services to

Boston and Birmingham this month.QAC recently expanded portfolio

of services with the introduction of QR Express and QR Equine.

The two product lines ensure the special needs of each customer are fully met throughout the transport experience.

QR Express provides clients with the opportunity to book shipments with high boarding priority and rapid handling at origin and destination.

With QR Equine our team of spe-cialists ensure that horses experience QA’s globally renowned service and comfort.

QAC offers other customer prod-ucts, including QR Fresh and QR Pharma, for the handling and trans-portation of temperature-controlled goods such as perishable products and delicate pharmaceuticals, and QR On-Board Courier for smaller packages that require immediate care and attention from a handler.

Daniel Parker (left), Vice-President, Global Sales, Qatar Airways Cargo, receives the award from Hemanth D P, Chief Operating Officer, Aero Commercial, Cargo & Asia Pacific Flying School, GMR Airports.

Qatar Airways Cargo wins global award for excellence STAT Times readers rate the world’s third-largest air cargo carrier ‘highly acclaimed’ in the International Air Cargo Airline of the Year category.

Qatar Red Crescent Society officials with students during a visit to Kenya.

QRCS team visits Kenya to promote

International Humanitarian Law

HOME06 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: Multi-award-winning screenwriter, director and leading US indie producer James Schamus shared his journey to becoming a filmmaker, at Qumra in a candid, humorous and inspirational master class on Sunday.

The session was the first of five master classes during the second edi-tion of Qumra, the annual industry event by Doha Film Institute (DFI) designed to nurture the development of emerging filmmakers.

Schamus recalled how he got interested in film, growing up in Los Angeles and watching silent movies on Friday nights on TV. He described his first meeting with Ang Lee when he co-founded the US production company Good Machine in the early 1990s with Ted Hope, and decided to focus on making ‘no budget movies’.

“Ted loves to make lists and made a list of everyone who had made a short film in the last 10 years but had never made a feature. Ang had made a short while at NYU Film School and it was amazing. So we called his agent and were told he was work-ing on some big projects and thanks for the interest but we heard noth-ing back.

“Then two weeks later we got a call out of the blue from Ang saying he’d won a screenplay prize in Tai-wan and had $300,000 to make a feature and he’d heard we were the guys who made movies for no money.”

From that first encounter grew a long working collaboration that spanned nine movies, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won four Academy Awards and

remains the highest-grossing non-English-language film in the US. It was screened at Qumra as part of the Modern Masters Screenings.

On the importance of casting directors, Schamus discussed how much he enjoys the casting proc-ess when working with first-time filmmakers.

“My heart goes out to actors. I admire them as they risk more than anybody and they are very vulnera-ble. They need respect so I always try to give as long and wide a space for emotions to play themselves out and let them know we will catch them if they fall. Casting is 90 percent of directing.”

On his recent move into directing – first with the short documentary That Film About Money in 2014 and

his feature directorial debut Indigna-tion, he said: “Directing is a disease that strikes middle-aged producers. I knew I was always susceptible, but I’d always had the luxury of writing for Ang so why would I have done it before!”

Asked about the key to success in becoming a screenwriter and his advice in overcoming the biggest challenges he has faced as a writer, he joked: “The biggest problem is get-ting started. Screenplays are a purely instrumental document; they are rhe-torical documents that are not in and of themselves works of art. My def-inition of a screenplay is 124 pages of begging for money. You are not writing a sonnet, it doesn’t have to be particularly elegant, it has to be persuasive.”

Richard Pena (left), moderates the first Qumra Master Class with multi- award-winning screenwriter James Schamus on day two of Qumra, the second edition of the industry event by Doha Film Institute dedicated to the development of emerging filmmakers.

Award-winning director James Schamus

shares his experiences at Qumra

The Peninsula

DOHA: Work is in progress in the ‘Touch of Warmth’ project of Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) in needy parts of Syria, with a budget of $1.1m (QR4m), under its Warm Winter 2015-2016 campaign.

The latest winterisation aid

distributions were in Kafar Naha in western and southern Aleppo coun-tryside, Jarjnaz in Idlib countryside, Qasr Ibn Wardan in eastern Hama countryside, areas of Damascus, Rif Dimashq, Daraa countryside and Homs.

In the towns, children received warm clothes to protect their fragile health against the bitter cold.

The innocent children smiled as they wore new warm clothes with the help of QRCS staff, who talked to them in a friendly manner and took group photos with them to help them forget the atrocities of war and dis-placement and compensate them for deprivation of their basic rights to playing, food, warmth and education.

For more than three months now, QRCS relief personnel have been con-ducting the production, procurement, and distribution processes of the project in cooperation with Interna-tional Community Development and Human Support Foundation (SDI) and International Humanitarian Relief

(IHR). The project aims to distrib-ute 30,500 bags of children’s winter clothes and 225,000 litres of heat-ing oil and restore 200 households damaged by war. All clothes were produced and delivered by 26 con-tracted workshops, which hired more than 370 local workers.

Distribution of the second batch of heating oil (125,000 litres) has begun, following distribution of the first batch of 100,000 litres at the rate of 40 per family. Homes res-toration works were welcomed by communities, beneficiaries, and pro-fessionals, including electricians, plumbers, construction workers, car-penters, among others,

So far, 80 homes in Rif Dimashq and 30 in Aleppo have been restored.

There are also indirect benefici-aries, including 370 sewing workers, 150 reconstruction workers, 80 vol-unteers supervising the project, and 20 volunteers to distribute the heat-ing oil.

The project is part of QRCS’s

Warm Winter campaign for 2015-2016 to protect Syrian children against the cold winter, help reduce

child mortality rates, encourage school attendance and prevent absenteeism, support local livelihood,

reactivate small-to-medium plants and workshops and reach out to the beleaguered and most needy areas.

Children receive warm clothes to protect themselves against the bitter cold as part of Warm Winter 2015-2016 campaign at a cost of QR4m for 60,000 beneficiaries.

QRCS’s ‘Touch of Warmth’ project continues in Syria

A Qatar Red Crescent Society volunteer with Syrian children after dressing them in warm clothes.

The Peninsula

DOHA: A team of senior leaders from Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) collected the health education lead-ership award presented by the Arab Hospitals Federation during its 17th forum in Cairo, Egypt, last week.

The team won the award in rec-ognition of a documentary film on their experiences in trekking to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro last year. The film stressed the impor-tance of physical exercise for all ages and conveys the message that older people can engage in sports, includ-ing climbing mountain peak.

Mohamed Mubarak Al Noimi, Chief of Communications and Chief of Staff at HMC Managing Director’s office, and member of the Executive Board of the federation, received the award on behalf of HMC from Dr Ahmad Imad Addin Rady, Egyptian

Minister of Health and Population, and Dr Tawfik bin Ahmad Khoja, Director-General, Executive Board, GCC Health Ministers Council and Secretary-General of the federation.

Ali Abdullah Al Khater, Chief of Communications, Corporate Com-munications Department, HMC, and Head of the HMC delegation to the forum, thanked the federation for the award and recognition.

He said the award reflected the importance HMC places on creating health awareness among Qatar’s population.

“We always urge the public to adopt a healthy lifestyle, especially by engaging in activities that con-tribute to the prevention of diseases. Health education is part of our role in promoting a healthy community by giving people the knowledge to take control of their health,” he added.

During a discussion panel com-prising Arab health ministers, Dr Saleh bin Ali Al Marri, Assistant

Secretary-General, Medical Affairs, the Ministry of Public Health, said constant migration of Arab medi-cal practitioners out of the region is one of the main challenges facing the development of healthcare systems in the Arab region.

He stressed Qatar’s efforts towards retaining competent Arab medical practitioners to serve its healthcare sector by allocating 2.8 percent of the budget for scientific research and to attract the most prestigious universities and scien-tific institutions to open branches in the country.

At an exhibition on the side-line, HMC’s delegation received Saif bin Moqaddam Albuainain, Qatari Ambassador to Egypt and Permanent Delegate to Arab League, and Khalid Ali Al Malki Al Juhani, First Secre-tary at the Qatari embassy in Egypt.

Al Noimi and Al Khater awarded HMC plaques to top visitors to the corporation’s stand.

Ali Abdullah Al Khater, Chief of Communications, Corporate Communications Department, HMC, and members of his delegation pose for a group photo at the forum in Cairo.

HMC documentary wins award in Cairo

HOME 07MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: Josoor Institute, a centre of excellence for the sports and events industries, inspired and developed by the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC), collaborated for the first time with Qatar University’s Col-lege of Arts and Sciences (QU-CAS) to deliver two professional development workshops on sports and events.

The workshops ‘Marketing and Public Relations (PR) for Sport and Major Events’ and ‘Creating High Per-formance Sports Organisations’ are the result of a long-lasting partner-ship between QU and Josoor and had in attendance a large number of dele-gates, including over 60 QU students.

The workshops also had over 40 delegates from Qatar Stars League and its clubs attend and engage in thought-provoking discussions with the speakers. Overall, there were 180 delegates from local organisations attending the workshops.

Mushtaq Al Waeli, Executive Director (Acting), Josoor Institute, said: “This was our first collaboration with QU for the delivery of profes-sional development workshops and I would like to commend the QU team on their contribution to making the

workshops a success. “We aim to train and inspire

many professionals working in the sports and events industries in Qatar and the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region. This would include the younger generations who have the important mission to build Qatar’s leading position in these industries and deliver an amazing 2022 FIFA World Cup.”

The workshops were tailored to address challenges faced by sports and events professionals in Mena and build sustainable sports and events industries in this part of the world.

‘Marketing and PR for Sport and Major Events’ examined the essential role marketing and PR play in driv-ing interest and increasing visibility for sporting and non-sporting major events. With many world champion-ships and regional events embraced by the Arab world in recent years and large-scale brands and promoters defining specific approaches for the local market, there is an increasing demand for sports marketing and PR professionals in the region.

The workshop developed engag-ing and interesting topics, from practical tips for successful sports and marketing campaigns, includ-ing best real life examples of sports campaigns in the Middle East to the

impact of social media for the sports industry.

‘Creating High Performance Sports Organisations’ workshop dealt with a relevant topic for sports organ-isations in Qatar and the region. It started with a session by sports psy-chologist Tom Cross, who prepared the delegates for change and innova-tion by making them more aware of their personal style of working and interacting with their teams.

Each workshop also featured a keynote speaker who shared knowledge and inspiration with the delegates. The first keynote speaker was Sunny Singh, Senior Market-ing Officer, Qatar Sports Investment (Burrda Sportswear Brand), who talked about driving innovation, reaching new audiences and build-ing relationships.

Simon Clegg, one of the most experienced sports business leaders in the UK, was a keynote speaker for the second workshop.

Both workshops were delivered by international and local experts, including Dr Mahfoud Amara, Assist-ant Professor, Sport Management and Policy, QU, Nick Thain, CEO, Sports New Media and GiveMeSport, and social media expert for the sports industry; and Keith Scully, Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University.

The Peninsula

DOHA: An awareness lecture was held for customs inspectors to help improve their skills to detect counterfeit products, fight commercial fraud and protect intellec-tual property rights.

The lecture was organised to mark Arab Customs Day that falls on March 3 every year.

Customs officials, especially the inspectors, were told how to tell a replica of a real product from the real prod-uct itself, among other things.

Latest techniques to fight commercial fraud and help protect intellectual property rights were also explained to the participants. The lecture was held as part of a broader goal to implement the recommendations of Directors-General of Customs Departments in the Arab world.

The focus was on recommendations, particularly the ones made at the 25th Meeting of Arab Customs Direc-tors-General held in the year 2013.

It was decided at this meeting to mark March 3 every year as Arab Customs Day, a release from Qatar’s Cus-toms General Authority said yesterday.

Eric Chevallier, French Ambassador to Qatar, announces the Gout de France event, at a press conference at his residence yesterday. The event will be held on March 21. Pic: Baher / The Peninsula

Gout de France on March 21 Josoor and QU host sports and events workshopsThe workshops are the result of a long-lasting partnership between QU and Josoor and were attended by a large number of delegates, including over 60 QU students.

One of the workshops in progress.

Awareness lecture on fake products held

An official explaining to customs inspectors and officials how to differentiate between the replica of a real product and the real product at the event to mark Arab Customs Day.

Mourners hold a banner bearing portraits of veteran Sudan Islamist opposition leader Hassan Al Turabi during his funeral in the capital Khartoum, yesterday. Turabi, one of the fiercest critics of President Omar Hassan Al Bashir’s government, died of a heart attack on Saturday.

Homage to Turabi

MIDDLE EAST08 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Iranian tycoon sentenced to death for fraud

AFP

TEHRAN: Iran’s billionaire tycoon Babak Zanjani has been sentenced to death for corruption, a judicial official said yes-terday, after a long trial in which he was accused of fraudulently pocketing $2.8bn.

Zanjani became notorious during the era of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, finding ways to channel hard currency from oil sales to Tehran despite financial sanctions imposed on the Islamic repub-lic’s banks as punishment for its nuclear programme.

The 41-year-old was convicted of fraud and economic crimes and as well as fac-ing the death penalty he must repay money to the state, judiciary spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejeie said at his weekly press conference.

The trial was held in public, a rarity for such a major case in Iran, and two other accused were also convicted of “corrup-tion on earth”, the most serious offence under the country’s criminal code, mean-ing they too will face the death penalty.

“The preliminary court has sentenced these three defendants to be executed, as well as paying restitution to the plaintiff,” Mohseni-Ejeie said, adding that that was

the oil ministry. They must also pay a “fine equal to one fourth of the money that was laundered”, the spokesman said, without specifying the sum.

Zanjani, who can appeal, had denied any wrongdoing, insisting that the only reason the money had not been paid to the oil ministry was that sanctions had prevented a planned transfer from tak-ing place.

However, the case follows repeated declarations from the current govern-ment of President Hassan Rowhani that corruption and the payment of illegal commissions thrived under Ahmadine-jad’s rule. Other trials are ongoing.

Zanjani had repeatedly said in media interviews that in return for commissions paid by Ahmadinejad’s government he was tasked with circumventing sanctions to get money back to Iran.

In October last year, however, Rowha-ni’s oil minister Bijan Zanganeh signalled the shifting political balance in Iran, hit-ting out at the use of middlemen such as Zanjani, who before being arrested had boasted of his personal wealth.

Iranian media have put it as high as $13.5bn.

Speaking after Iran concluded a nuclear deal with world powers, paving the way for increased foreign activity in Iran’s oil sector, Zanganeh urged inves-tors to deal directly with his ministry and avoid third parties.

“We despise the corrupt parasites that want to suck the nation’s blood even in this situation,” Zanganeh said, to loud applause at an oil and energy industry event in the capital while Zanjani’s trial was under way.

AFP

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netan-yahu spoke yesterday of “strong” ties with the United States ahead of a visit by Vice-President Joe Biden, despite deep disagreement over the nuclear accord with Iran.

“This visit expresses the strong relations between Israel and our ally the US,” Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting.

“There are those who have predicted the collapse of these relations. It is not so. The relationship is strong in all areas and also in face of the challenges that we are standing together against in our region.”

Biden is set to arrive tomorrow for talks with Netanyahu as well as Palestinian President Mah-moud Abbas in Ramallah.

Israel and the United States have been seeking to move past deep disagreement over the Iran nuclear accord, which Netanyahu strongly opposed, and work out a new 10-year defence aid package.

The current deal grants Israel some $3.1bn annu-ally, in addition to spending on other projects such as missile defence.

Biden’s visit comes amid a five-month wave of vio-lence in Israel and the Palestinian territories that has killed 181 Palestinians as well as 28 Israelis.

Most of the Palestinians who died in the violence were killed while carrying out knife, gun or car-ram-ming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.

Others were shot dead by Israeli forces during clashes or demonstrations.

The White House said on Friday that Biden would not be pursuing any major new peace initiatives during his visit. US President Barack Obama has acknowl-edged that there will be no comprehensive agreement between Israelis and Palestinians before he leaves office in January 2017.

UN chief seeks talks to resolve Western Sahara insurgencyReuters

ALGIERS: United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon said yesterday he had asked his envoy for the dis-puted Western Sahara territory to meet the Polisario independence movement and Morocco to bring the two sides back to negotiations to end their conflict.

Morocco took most of West-ern Sahara in 1975 following the withdrawal of the colonial power Spain. The Polisario Front, which says the territory belongs to eth-nic Sahrawis, waged a guerrilla war until a UN-brokered cease-fire in 1991. UN attempts to hold a referendum on the future of the region have failed since then, with the two sides deadlocked.

“I asked my special envoy Christopher Ross to resume his shuttle diplomacy to create the appropriate atmosphere for the resumption of talks,” Ban said in Algiers after visiting the Sahrawi refugee camps where Polisario Front is based in southern Alge-ria, near the Moroccan border.

Ban has said he wants to relaunch negotiations to resolve the conflict so Sahrawi refugees can return home to Western Sahara. He said yesterday he would call for a donors’ con-ference to raise funds for the Sahrawi camps.

Many of the Sahrawi refu-gees, who fled the fighting in Western Sahara, have been living

in mud brick houses in the harsh Tindouf area in southern Algeria for some 40 years.

Polisario leader Mohammed Abdelaziz last week called Ban’s visit the best chance in a long time to reset negotiations, but many in the Sahrawi camps are deeply frustrated over the long-delayed referendum and lack of progress.

Egypt and France

begin military

exercises in the

Mediterranean

AFP

CAIRO: Egypt and France began yesterday joint manoeuvres in the Mediterranean in which French Rafale warplanes purchased by Cairo last year are taking part, the Egyptian army said.

The “Ramses 2016” military and naval exercise is being held off the coast of the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and are expected to last for several days, the army said on its Facebook page.

Paris announced the manoeu-vres Tuesday saying the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, which is being used to launch air strikes on the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, would also take part. The drill is aimed at “shar-ing our expertise with the Egyptian military... one of our main Mid-dle East partners,” the French defence ministry said at the time. The Egyptian army said a French multi-mission frigate purchased by Cairo last year would also take part in the drill along with Rafale combat jets and F-16 warplanes.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (right) arrives for a one-day visit to the indigenous Sahrawi refugee camp of Al Smara in Tindouf, southern Algeria.

Two other convicts likely to get death in trial held in public.

Egypt replaces farm quarantine official Reuters

CAIRO: Egypt has appointed a new head of its agriculture quarantine authority, the ministry of agriculture said yesterday, replacing Saad Moussa, who has been at the centre of a controversy over the coun-try’s wheat imports.

Moussa imposed a zero tolerance pol-icy on ergot, a common grains fungus.

This was at odds with the ministry of agriculture and supply backing a more common international standard that allows trace levels.

Many traders have declined in recent months to make offers in state wheat tenders.

Netanyahu plays

down rift with US

MIDDLE EAST 09MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

A ship sunk during the 1991 Gulf War is seen at Shatt Al Arab in Basra, Iraq.

War junk

Iraqis gather at the scene of a truck bomb attack in Hilla, southern Baghdad, yesterday. At least 60 people were killed in the blast.

All that remainsTurkey rules out bargaining over new constitution

Reuters

ISTANBUL: There will be no bar-gaining over a new constitution for Turkey which could enhance the powers of the president and the gov-ernment will seek to put the matter to a referendum, the prime minister said yesterday.

The ruling AKP party will have the support of all its 317 deputies for a new charter and will look for an additional 13 votes from the opposi-tion that are needed to take the draft to a referendum, Ahmet Davutoglu said in an interview with broadcaster A Haber.

A cross-party commission charged with drafting a new con-stitution collapsed last month after the main opposition pulled out over attempts by the AKP to change Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential system.

“All 317 AK Party lawmakers will do what’s necessary. The constitu-tion is not up for bargaining, it’s a matter of principles,” Davutoglu said. “We will find the 330 (votes) and take it to a referendum. Our people will have a constitution embraced by all, and the (current) charter will be consigned.”

Senior AKP officials said last week that the party was working on its own proposals despite the opposition’s resistance, plans which could hand President Recep Tayyip Erdogan powers to draft legislation directly and pick ministers.

The AKP has broad support for

overhauling the constitution, which dates back to the period after the 1980 military coup and has been repeatedly amended. But there are wide divergences over what a new charter should look like.

Erdogan wants the charter to transform the presidency from largely ceremonial to an executive post with expansive powers.

Davutoglu said parliament will begin debate on revoking the par-liamentary immunity for lawmakers from the opposition Peoples’ Dem-ocratic Party (HDP), which has Kurdish roots, after budget talks conclude on Wednesday.

The Justice Ministry last week submitted a request for the assem-bly to scrap the protection from prosecution of five HDP lawmak-ers, including the HDP’s co-leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, after repeated calls by Erdogan.

The ultra-right National-ist Movement Party, parliament’s fourth-biggest grouping with 40 seats, has signalled its support for stripping Demirtas and the others of their immunity.

Demirtas, who faces some 60 dossiers for things he has said, told reporters at a briefing the AKP was using the issue to tap nationalist support during a time of clashes between security forces and Kurd-ish militants in Turkey’s restive southeast.

“The government has raised the issue of our immunity before, but this time they appear serious,” he said. “They want to scapegoat us. We don’t want this to happen because not only will it hurt our party but all of Turkish society and its democracy.”

Even if parliament lifts the law-makers’ immunity, the HDP will retain its 59 seats until any prose-cution is complete, which could take years, Demirtas said.

Egypt arrests 14 Brotherhood membersReuters

CAIRO: Egypt has accused exiled Muslim Brotherhood officials of conspiring with Gaza-based Hamas militants to assassinate Public Pros-ecutor Hisham Barakat last year and arrested 14 people in connection with the attack.

Barakat, 64, was killed by a car bomb in Cairo in June 2015. He was the most senior state official assassi-nated since the toppling in mid-2013 of elected president Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack at the time.

Interior Minister Magdi Abdel Ghaffar told a news conference that the attack was ordered by Tur-key-based leaders of Egypt’s oldest Islamist movement and coordinated with Hamas. He accused Hamas of helping to provide training and explosives.

He said the authorities had arrested 48 members of a Muslim Brotherhood cell aimed at under-mining security through a series of attacks. Fourteen of them had con-fessed to killing Barakat.

“This is a very big conspiracy that started a long time ago and contin-ued,” he said.

A judicial source said yesterday that six people had been arrested

for Barakat’s murder. The official MENA news agency reported that those arrested were suspects in sev-eral acts of “terrorism, possessing and using explosives, and joining a ter-rorist group”.

Judges and other senior officials have been targeted by radical Islam-ists since then-military chief Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ousted Mursi after mass protests against his rule.

Sisi, who went on to win a presi-dential election the next year, banned the Brotherhood and jailed thousands of its followers. Security forces killed hundreds of Mursi supporters in a sin-gle day in the bloodiest episode in Egypt’s modern history.

The Egyptian judiciary says it is

independent of the government and military, but some judges have been accused of bias after handing down lengthy jail terms and mass death sentences.

The crackdown, which has included restrictions on freedom of protest, has angered many oppo-nents of Sisi who has struggled to suppress an insurgency that is raging in the Sinai Peninsula which borders Hamas-controlled Gaza.

The attack last June cast doubt on Egypt’s ability to contain an Islam-ist insurgency based in Sinai that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers since Sisi took over. The Brotherhood has been banned and designated as a terrorist organisation.

US builds two

air bases in

Kurdish-controlled

northern Syria

Reuters

AMMAN: The United States has nearly finished setting up an air base in Kurdish-controlled north-ern Syria and was proceeding with the construction of a second base for dual military and civilian use, a Kurdish website said yesterday.

The Erbil-based news website BasNews, quoting a military source in the Kurdish-backed Syria Dem-ocratic Forces (SDF), said most of the work on a runway in the oil town of Rmeilan in Hasaka was complete while a new air base southeast of Kobani, straddling the Turkish border, was being constructed.

The source in the US-backed alliance that also includes Arab armed groups told the news portal scores of US experts and techni-cians were involved in the project.

Syrian Kurdish officials had recently said the Rmeilan airstrip was being used by US military hel-icopters for logistics and deliveries.

The United States sent doz-ens of special operations troops to northern Syria last year to advise opposition forces in their fight against the militant group Islamic State. They have also dropped supply munitions to rebels in the province. Last month, US advisors backed by coalition air strikes assisted Kurdish-led Syrian rebels in encircling and capturing the strategic Syrian town of Sha-dadi from Islamic State but were away from the frontlines, US offi-cials said.

The Syrian Kurds have estab-lished control over wide areas of northern Syria since the country erupted into civil war in 2011.

18 migrants dead as boat sinks in AegeanReuters

ISTANBUL: At least 18 people attempting to reach Greece drowned after their boat sank off the Turkish coast yesterday, the state-run Ana-dolu news agency reported, on the eve of a European meeting aimed at tackling the number of migrants.

The Turkish Coast Guard, using speedboats and a helicopter, rescued 15 people and recovered 18 bodies in the Aegean Sea near the town of Didim, Anadolu said. Efforts con-tinued to find more victims whose nationalities were not given.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will be in Brussels for today’s emergency summit with European Union leaders seeking to reduce illegal migration to member states, much of which occurs through Turkey.

“Turkey has been carrying this burden pretty much on its own for

five years,” Davutoglu told report-ers at a news conference yesterday before his departure. “But since the second half of 2015, this matter has become part of the Europe Union’s agenda, and we are pleased with the sensibility Europe has displayed and its willingness to work together.”

The EU has offered Turkey ¤3bn ($3.3bn) to do more to stop migrants from attempting the perilous jour-ney. The migrant crisis has divided the EU’s political leaders and threat-ened the bloc’s open-border policy.

So far this year, 135,000 migrants have reached Europe ille-gally, 126,000 via Turkey, and more than 400 have died, many on the so-called eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey to Greece, the Interna-tional Organization for Migration has said. Last year, a million peo-ple reached Europe through illegal routes, many fleeing economic and political turmoil in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia.

Turkish opposition paper turns pro-govt after takeoverReuters

ISTANBUL: A day after Turkey’s top-selling newspaper Zaman was taken over by the state, it dropped its crit-icisms of the government yesterday and published flattering stories on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The episode is the latest twist in a long-running conflict between Erdogan and US-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen.

Police raided the offices of Zaman, which is affiliated with Gulen,

late on Friday after a court approved a request by a prosecutor to appoint a state administrator to the daily. The prosecutor is investigating whether funds have been diverted to Gulen.

Yesterday’s front page included a story about Erdogan’s planned recep-tion to mark International Women’s Day and his visit to the site of a bridge being built across Istanbul’s Bospho-rus Strait.

There was no mention of pro-tests by Gulen’s supporters on Friday and Saturday when police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse

large crowds gathered outside of the newspaper.

Rights groups and European offi-cials criticised the seizure, saying it infringed on press freedom in the EU candidate country.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davu-toglu, who is flying to Brussels for an emergency summit on refugees today, rejected that charge, saying a legal process was under way to investi-gate illicit financing of a “terrorist” organisation and that there had been no political interference.

Erdogan and Davutoglu accuse

Gulen of plotting to topple their government in 2013 after police sus-pected of belonging to the religious movement leaked a corruption inves-tigation into Erdogan’s family and ministers.

Some 50 people stood outside of the paper’s Istanbul offices again yesterday, witnesses said. The atmos-phere was calm.

Yesterday’s edition was a slim ver-sion of its previous self at just 12 pages and with sparse content.

Zaman’s website was offline, with a message that read: “We will provide

you, our readers, with a better qual-ity and more objective service as soon as possible.” The website of the Eng-lish-language Today’s Zaman, which was also confiscated, featured stories about the takeover and the EU’s criti-cal response but had not been updated since Saturday.

Zaman’s editors were once largely supportive of Erdogan, who served as prime minister between 2003 and 2014 before winning the presidency, but differences emerged over foreign policy and a government plan to shut schools run by Gulen’s followers.

PM says new charter will be put to a referendum

By Alexandra Petri

The Washington Post

The Holy Grail has one up on the Establishment Lane. At least someone was able to

find the Holy Grail. Marco Rubio has not been so lucky.

Did you know that if you whis-per “George Herbert Walker Bush” three times into a mirror, the Estab-lishment Lane will appear and open a path to victory for you?

The media has said it often and it must be true. The Establishment Lane was a beautiful legend. Imag-ine! A lane where all you needed was major donors and the support of party leaders, and voters would flow like milk and honey.

It is just north of the Fountain of Youth, right past the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but before you find the Holy Grail. It is visible in the background of photos of Bigfoot, although you cannot see it because the photos are always so blurry.

For years, Marco Rubio sat at the knee of people who told him the tale of a beautiful, wonderful place called the Establishment Lane, where a young candidate could go to make his fortune. The media assured him that it existed. It existed and was paved with major donors and it would solve all his problems. But then Marco Rubio actually went out on the road to look for it. He and Jeb Bush rode forth from Camelot (Fla.) on matching

horses to seek it. He even shoved Jeb Bush out of the way in the hopes of getting there sooner.

But he rode and rode and passed all the landmarks by which the pun-dits (always so reassuringly certain of everything) said that one might be able to identify the lane. The second-place polling. The media plaudits. The praise on Sunday morning shows. He rode further.

There were definitely lanes. The Outsider Lane was most certainly real. People kept passing him in it.

He was right where it should have been. His position was cor-rect. Except: no lane.

He tried again. He showed up to CPAC, even though he clearly had a terrible cold. He delivered a speech, coughing intermittently. He attacked Donald Trump, as the establishment urged someone to step up and do. He did all the things recommended by the People Who Said This Was Surely Real. But -- nothing. On “Super Saturday” he

placed no higher than third in any state. Where was the dang lane? He rode and rode but found only voters, under whelmed.

After Super Saturday, the Estab-lishment Lane joins the Fountain of Youth, city of El Dorado, and Atlantis on the list of Things That Sounded So Beautiful That People Went Out Looking For Them, Wandered For Years, And Then Were Forced To Return Home Empty-Handed, But With The Sympathy Of The Peo-ple of Minnesota.

The Establishment Lane sounded so real and so beautiful that someone was bound to believe. But so far Marco Rubio has found himself in the unenviable posi-tion of someone whose parents were so convincing about Santa that he expected gifts from him as a grown-up. And who can blame him? Everyone who Knows About These Things for a living was so sure.

But when have they ever been right, this cycle?

OPINION10 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Western countries need to formulate a more coherent and effective strategy to fight the Islamic State in Libya as the militants are expanding their operations in the country. The issue has acquired urgency due to Libya’s

geographical proximity to Europe. If the IS is allowed to expand at the current pace and if Libya further weakens with the strengthening of militias which are ruling its large swathes, the situation could spin out of control.

Italy yesterday refused to send troops to Libya to fight the IS after a suggestion from the US ambassador in Italy that Rome could send up to 5,000 troops. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi made a statement explaining his country’s stance after two

Italian hostages freed in Libya (two fellow captives were allegedly killed by the Islamic State militants) were flown back home. “As long as I am prime minister, Italy will not go to Libya for an invasion with 5,000 men,” Renzi told Canale 5 television.

Five years after the revolution that ousted Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is deeply divided, with rival governments based in Tripoli and the east and efforts to form a national unity government failing despite intense efforts and accords. Militants loyal to Islamic State have taken advantage of a security vacuum after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi to expand their presence, establishing control over the coastal city of Sirte last

year. The government in Tripoli is trying

to weaken the IS, but its efforts haven’t been successful. For example, Libyan forces based in the city of Misrata are carrying out air strikes against Islamic State militants in their stronghold of Sirte. As many as 18 people were killed in the strikes, including senior Islamic State members, according to government officials. Such airstrikes are carried out regularly, but the militants have been entrenched enough to be uprooted by such attacks.

Italy is unlikely to be interested in a military involvement in its former colony and its focus so far has been on finding a solution inside Libya. Rome

is working with other Western powers and the United Nations to try to convince two rival Libyan governments to create a single, unity coalition and focus their energy on the fight against Islamic State. But this strategy isn’t working as the rival governments in Libya remain as divided as ever.

Americans have launched air strikes on Islamic State outposts in Libya and the French have conducted surveillance flights. US, French and British special forces are also in the country. This coalition needs to be broadened and the Libyan rival governments must be persuaded to form a unity government so that the fight against the militants can be ratcheted up and won.

IS in Libya

Western countries need to broaden their coalition to defeat the Islamic State in Libya.

Quote of the day

As long as I am prime minister, Italy will not go to Libya for an invasion with 5,000 men.

Matteo Renzi Italian Prime Minister

E S TA B L I S H E D I N 1996

CHAIRMANSHEIKH THANI BIN ABDULLAH AL THANI

ACTING EDITOR-IN-CHIEFDR. KHALID BIN MUBARAK AL-SHAFI

editorinchief@pen.com.qa

ACTING MANAGING EDITORHUSSAIN AHMAD

hussain@pen.com.qa

In his latest speech last week, Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, a political entity created by Iran in Lebanon in

the eighties, said that he has not been proud of all his public life. Per-haps one of these times is when he delivered a speech in March 2015 opposing the ‘military attack by Saudi Arabia and its allies against the Yemeni people’! That was a fiasco of a statement. Hezbollah was always saying that all its purpose in keeping forming a militia and arm-ing it was to fight Israel. To forget that prime goal and turn its guns on Saudi Arabia and their allies, this means, in political terms, that the masters of Hezbollah in Tehran, have instructed their agent to open political fire somewhere else, far away from Israel, after decades of deceiving the Arab general public that their prime goal was to fight Tel Aviv.

However,this is not the first time Hezbollah has changed its targets. Almost four years ago Hezbollah sent fighters to Syria, to rescue a regime that has com-mitted the most terrible atrocities against its own people-a regime far more brutal and corrupt than any other in the region. Hezbol-lah is not ashamed to defend this

brutally and stand hand in hand with a gross injustice. Those lost, dead and injured from his own militia, are now almost three times those in the 2006 war! The phenomena of Hezbollah could be categorised as ‘ravenous’ catching the ‘virus’ of ISIS!

Hezbollah was in direct con-flict with Israel in the summer of 2006, when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on the border with Lebanon. Israel retaliated because of that, and war broke out for thirty five days. All of Lebanon was at the mercy of the Israeli fighters and guns. One thou-sand Lebanese citizens lost their lives, most of them civilians and around ten thousand left their vil-lages in the south. An international ceasefire was agreed, Hezbollah accordingly was banned in the zone up to 35 kilometres from the Lebanese Israeli borders, Fifteen thousand blue-hats (UN forces) were placed to guard the border, to prevent any Hezbollah member coming near to it! The propaganda of Hezbollah later called that arrangement a “triumph”!

The Arab-Israel war broke out several times, in more than half a century of continued conflict. The most well-known of them are three: the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973. The latter was very impor-tant, as it brought some peace to the region. Egyptian and Syrian forces fought on both borders, and thousands of soldiers died from both camps. The Egyptians alone lost, some estimate, as much as six thousand, and twelve thou-sand were wounded. Hundreds of items of military hardware were destroyed, but the battle for diplomacy was won, because the Gulf Countries became involved. At the time, the Gulf states, led

by Saudi Arabia,scaled down oil production-starting with a decrease of 10%.Later,the Saudi King at the time, Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz,ordered a ban on selling Saudi oil to the United states. Thousands of cars were seen in long lines at the filling stations,queuing for refills. The concept of the “oil weapon” had been introduced for the first time to the international media. This action made Hennery Kissinger, the former secretary of United States at the time, hurry to the region to sort out some kind of compromise. A process was put in the pipeline for later,resulting in Egyptians gaining their whole land in Sinai, and ‘almost perma-nent’ peace in the Golan Heights on the Syrian border.

At that time probably Nasral-lah, in his Cartel, did not know what Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states had contributed to the war effort and the conflict with Israel. In fact, he said publicly in the aftermath of Lebanese war in 2006, if he knew what the war

could bring to the Lebanese peo-ple, he would not have sought any ‘provocation of Israel’.

Anyway since that time, and for long time to come, Hassan Nasrullah nor his Iranian back-ers, have ever dared to provoke another war or even a skirmish with Israel- the eight years since has proven that. His war will be limited to helping the poor Leba-nese, their economy, their system of law,and their livelihood, and he will be known for his action towards the Gulf States and fiery statements.

He is now risking the liveli-hoods of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese workers in the Gulf-they can go nowhere to work in fact. The big question is where is Hez-bollah taking Lebanon to? Does it want to create a “Welayat Al Faqih” in the style of Iran?! Could it do that in a diversified society, with Christian, Sunni and Druze, and almost ten other domina-tions? Until what time can it hold a gun over the heads of most Leb-anese citizens, who do not share its convictions?

Also, what kind of action can Hezbollah take now towards its exhausted slogan, ‘fighting Israel’? Who on earth still believes that? Hezbollah is now no more than: a hired gun” and big mouth, involv-ing itself in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and a number of other places, fighting to enhance the Iranian interests. This being tol-erated no more, which is why the GCC has declared Hezbollah a ter-rorist organization- nobody now fears Hasan Nasrallah!

Dr Mohammed Al Rumaihi, The writer is an academic and researcher in GCC affairs.

Who fears Nasrallah?

By Dr Mohammed Al Rumaihi

Marco Rubio and the myth of the establishment lane

EDITOR IAL

All thoughts and views expressed in these columns are those of the writers, not of the newspaper. All correspondence regarding Opinion page should be mailed to the Editor-in-Chief.

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Hezbollahis now no more than: A hired gun” and big mouth, involving itself in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and a number of other places, fighting to enhance the Iranian interests.

ASIA / PHILIPPINES 11MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

China tells HongKong not to politicise issues

Reuters

BEIJING: China’s third-ranked Com-munist Party leader Zhang Dejiang said Hong Kong shouldn’t “politicise everything” and should instead focus on integrating its economy with China’s, according to members of China’s parliament who met with him yesterday.

A day after Premier Li Keqiang pledged greater economic sup-port for Hong Kong at the opening of annual parliamentary sessions in Beijing, Zhang said that while a recent riot in Hong Kong was a concern, it was one the city’s gov-ernment could handle.

“He (Zhang) said one needed to take a broader perspective to look at it, and to not politicise everything,” said Rita Fan, a standing commit-tee member of China’s parliament chaired by Zhang.

Chinese media has blamed the riot in early February on “radical

separatists” seeking to destabilise Hong Kong.

Other delegates who met with Zhang said that while Zhang didn’t single out anyone for blame, there remained concern among Beijing’s top leaders towards an embittered cluster of youth groups in Hong Kong using increasingly radical or violent means to demand greater autonomy.

China maintains Hong Kong is an inseparable part of China and as such resolutely opposes any moves towards independence.

Reuters was not able to contact Zhang for comment. Calls to Chi-na’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office in Beijing after regular busi-ness hours went unanswered.

NATIONAL SECURITY“They worry about the rise of

separatism,” said Lau Siu-kai, a former senior Hong Kong govern-ment adviser who met with Zhang on Friday with other members of the Chinese People’s Political Consulta-tive Conference, a top parliamentary advisory body.

“If something big happens in Hong Kong that is seen as threaten-ing national security, I don’t expect China to wait, they may take the ini-tiative to protect national security,” Lau told Reuters.

Hong Kong was returned from British to Chinese rule in 1997 under a “one country, two systems”

framework granting it broad freedoms and an independent judiciary, though with Beijing having ultimate authority.

As for the disappearances of five Hong Kong booksellers who published gossipy books of China’s leaders, the issue wasn’t raised by Zhang despite lingering questions about the cases.

All of the booksellers recently sur-faced to give interviews on Chinese television saying they had travelled voluntarily to China. But the Brit-ish government maintains one of the men, Lee Bo, had been “involuntarily

removed” from Hong Kong.China’s Foreign Ministry has said

its law enforcement officials would never do anything illegal, especially not overseas, and called on foreign governments not to interfere in Hong Kong affairs. “Even me, I still have some doubts ... most of the middle class actually have serious concerns,” Ma Fung-kwok, a Chinese parliamen-tary delegate said in a Beijing hotel lobby.

“If someone broke the Basic Law and tried to do illegal enforcement in

Hong Kong territory, this is something that shouldn’t be allowed... Even if it’s Chinese police.” Still, Andrew Yao, a Hong Kong businessman and member of China’s parliament, said such con-cerns were overplayed, with Beijing intent to maintain Hong Kong’s pros-perity and stability.

“I don’t see a pivot to a police state where they can come arrest us,” Yao said. Premier Li emphasised in his annual work report that Beijing would continue to “elevate” Hong Kong’s role in China’s economic development.

China’s updated draft five-year development blueprint also men-tioned a so-called “Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau big bay area” to boost economic synergies, as well as busi-ness and transport linkages between Hong Kong and southern China.

“He (Zhang) is saying ‘look ... don’t get politicised in all your social and economic issues, concentrate on developing your economy, ride with the tide of China rising’,” said Maria Tam, a veteran Hong Kong delegate to China’s parliamentary sessions.

Hostesses take selfies outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing during the second day of the National People’s Congress yesterday.

Philippines awaits

UN response after

seizing North

Korean ship

AFP

MANILA: The Philippine coast-guard said it was closely watching a North Korean vessel and its 21 crew members yesterday, as offi-cials waited for a response from the United Nations days after the ship was seized in compliance with new sanctions.

The 6,830-tonne cargo ship, the Jin Teng, is being held at Subic port, northeast of Manila, where the Philippine coastguard are guarding the freighter and mon-itoring its crew, said coastguard spokesman Commander Armand Balilo.

“We will probably keep it in Subic pending our request for guidance on its disposition,” he said. The ship’s 21 North Korean crew members remain onboard but are otherwise not restricted, he told AFP. “They are just on the ship. They are remaining there. They have provisions of their own. They won’t try to escape,” Balilo said, adding there was no need to pro-vide them with any supplies yet.

Earlier this week, a govern-ment spokesman said the North Koreans would eventually be deported, but there has been no confirmation when that would take place.

The Philippines said Saturday authorities had impounded the vessel in accordance with fresh UN sanctions introduced in the wake of Pyongyang’s recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests.

It was the first reported enforcement of the sanctions, the toughest to date, which were adopted late Wednesday by the UN Security Council. Balilo said the coastguard have inspected the ship twice, once using electronic sensors to search for weapons. However, no contraband has been found. A team from the UN is expected to inspect the ship in Subic, a former United States naval base, foreign affairs spokesman Charles Jose said earlier.

The Jin Teng arrived in the Philippines from Palembang, Indonesia, Thursday afternoon, just hours after the latest sanc-tions were unanimously passed.

Second bookseller detained in China returns to Hong KongReuters

HONG KONG: A second Hong Kong bookseller who went missing and was found to have been detained in China returned home yesterday, refusing to discuss his case, Hong Kong police said.

Cheung Chi Ping was one of five Hong Kong booksellers specialising in gossipy publications about Chi-nese leaders to go missing last year. A colleague from the same store re-appeared in the city on Friday.

“Cheung Chi Ping requested police to cancel his missing person case and stated that he did not require any assistance from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Gov-ernment or police,” the police said in a statement.

“Cheung refused to disclose other details,” it added.

Two of the others, Gui Minhai and Lee Bo had been outside main-land China when they disappeared. Gui was in Thailand and Lee in Hong Kong.

Gui appeared on state television

in January and tearfully confessed to a fatal drink-driving incident over a decade ago.

He appeared on Chinese televi-sion again late last month with three of his colleagues confirming for the first time they had been detained for “illegal book trading” in main-land China. British passport holder Lee, in an interview with China’s Phoenix Television last week, said he had not been kidnapped by Chi-nese authorities, as many suspect, but had sneaked into China illegally and that he would renounce his British

citizenship. The booksellers’ plight had provoked concerns that China was using shadowy tactics to weaken Hong Kong’s freedoms under the “one country, two systems” formula under which the global financial hub has been governed since its return to China from British rule in 1997.

Police had said on Wednesday that authorities in the southern Chi-nese province of Guangdong had told them Lui and his colleagues, Cheung Chi Ping and Lam Wing Kee, would be released on bail in coming days.

A number of governments have

expressed concern about the disap-pearances, which some diplomats fear were abductions by Chinese agents.

China’s Foreign Ministry has said its law enforcement officials would never do anything illegal, especially not overseas, and called on foreign governments not to interfere in Hong Kong affairs.

Hong Kong police said they would continue to follow the other missing person cases with the Inter-pol Guangdong Liaison Office of Guangdong Provincial Public Secu-rity Department.

S Korea to slap fresh sanctions on NorthAFP

SEOUL: South Korea will soon announce its own tougher sanctions on North Korea, an official said yes-terday, a move set to further heighten tensions as Seoul and Washington begin their largest-ever joint mili-tary exercise.

The new measures — following Wednesday’s decision by the UN Security Council to slap unprece-dented sanctions on the North — will be announced this week, a Seoul government official said on condi-tion of anonymity.

The Security Council announced its toughest sanctions yet to pun-ish the North for its recent nuclear and missile tests in violation of UN resolutions.

The North responded within hours by test-firing rockets into the sea. Its leader Kim Jong-Un ordered the nation’s nuclear arsenal to be

readied for pre-emptive use at “any moment”. The Seoul official did not elaborate on the South’s separate sanctions. Yonhap news agency said they would include banning any ships which have previously docked in the North from South Korean ports.

A group of North Korean indi-viduals and organisations believed involved in weapons development will also be added to a blacklist, it said, citing a government source.

In February, in an unprece-dentedly tough move, the South announced the total shutdown of a jointly-run industrial park in North Korea, saying Pyongyang had been using it to fund its nuclear weapons programmes.

Today, South Korea and its close ally the US begin their annual Key Resolve/Foal Eagle military drill.

This year’s will be the largest-ever, with the US reportedly sending more than 15,000 troops.

Students of North Korea’s Kim Hyong-Jik Education University protesting United Nations Security Council resolution on the country.

American woman gets infected with Zika in Philippines AFP

MANILA: An American woman was infected with the Zika virus while visiting the Philippines, health department officials said yesterday,

the first case detected in the country for several years.

Health Secretary Janette Garin said the US Centers for Disease Con-trol and Prevention (US-CDC) had informed her that a US resident who stayed in the Philippines for four weeks in January had apparently

developed symptoms in her last week before returning to America.

“We were informed that shortly after returning home to the US, an evidence of Zika virus infection was detected from the patient,” Garin said in a statement.

“Currently, we are coordinating

with US-CDC for the profile of the patient, including information on places she visited in the Philippines,” Garin said without giving details of the patient.

Health department officials said they still had no clue how the American was infected while in the

Philippines. The only previous known case of Zika in the country was a 15-year-old boy infected in 2012. He recovered after three weeks.

The mosquito-borne disease is usually not life-threatening but has been linked to a rise in birth defects in other countries.

Communist Party leader emphasises need for broader perspective.

ASIA / AFRICA12 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

LEFT: Zamani Zakaria, father of Mohd Razahan and wife Norli Ahma, the missing flight MH370 passengers, cries during a remembrance ceremony to mark the second anniversary of the plane’s disappearance, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, yesterday. CENTRE: A woman writes messages for the passengers of the missing airliner on a banner during the ceremony. RIGHT: A woman wears face paint reading ‘MH370 search on’.

Two years on, pressure to keep searching

Reuters

KUALA LUMPUR: The families of passengers lost aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 say the two-year search for the missing air-craft must go on beyond a June deadline, as new hope emerged last week of resolving the aviation mystery.

Debris found off the African coast rekin-dled hope for many, prompting relatives like Grace Subathirai Nathan to demand investi-gators go back over mistakes made early on.

“A lot of it was based on calculations that had never been used before, where there’s room for human error,” Nathan said in an interview. Nathan’s mother, Anne Daisy, was on board when MH370 disappeared on its way to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014, with 239 passengers and crew on board.

Some 120,000 square kilometres of the sea floor is being scoured at an estimated cost of about A$170m ($124.17m). But no trace of the missing Boeing 777 has been found except for a wing part, known as a flaperon, which surfaced on Reunion island off Madagascar last July.

Australia said in August that initial drift models of where debris from the jet might first wash up had incorrectly identified Indonesia as the most likely location.

“If that could be wrong, what else could be wrong?” Nathan, a 28-year-old lawyer, said.

A meeting set for June between Australia, Malaysia, and China will determine whether to extend the search.

But families are calling for the search to continue after the discovery last week of a white, metre-long chunk of metal suspected to be from MH370 off the coast of Mozambique. Just as they prepare to mark the two-year anniversary of the jet’s disappearance, the relatives are asking for efforts to focus on the southeast African coast.

Voice370, a support group for MH370 next-of-kin, said last week in a statement that the claims of funds drying up was “unacceptable” as a reason for ending the investigation, which they say could benefit the broader industry and increase safety.

BACK TO DRAWING BOARDYesterday, scores of family and friends of

those on board the plane gathered at a mall in Kuala Lumpur in a memorial seeking to “re-investigate, re-evaluate, re-start” the search.

Accompanied by poignant musical and dance performances, the next-of-kin made an impassioned plea for search efforts to continue

until the plane is found.“They can stop the search, but where do

we stop the feeling of loss? We want them to try, if possible, to continue searching for MH370,” said Jacquita Gonzales, the wife of MH370 in-flight supervisor Patrick Gomes.

MH370 vanished from radar screens shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, and investigators believe it was flown thou-sands of miles off course before eventually crashing into the ocean off Australia.

A 584-page interim report into the disap-pearance of the Boeing 777-200ER released on the first anniversary provided details on how radars tracked the plane going off course and issues concerning the battery of the flight data recorder’s underwater locator beacon.

However, it did not identify a definitive cause for the disappearance, adding there was nothing suspicious in the financial, medical or personal histories of pilots or crew.

The next interim report will be released tomorrow.

$30m drugs

seized in

Myanmar

AFP

YANGON: Police in Myanmar seized more than $30m worth of heroin and methamphetamine, a senior investigator said yesterday, a bust that highlights the country’s continued role as a major global drugs manufacturer.

Myanmar sits at the heart of the infamous “Golden Triangle”, which also covers parts of Thai-land and Laos, and has been a hotbed of narcotics production for decades despite repeated govern-ment vows to tackle the scourge.

“It’s worth about 37bn kyats ($30m),” a senior police official of the anti-drugs squad in Naypyidaw said on condition of anonym-ity. “This is the biggest seizure of 2016.”

Police found a smorgasbord of narcotics in a container vehicle on an industrial zone in Manda-lay including 82 kilogrammes of methamphetamine, 24 kilo-grammes of heroin, 6.8 million stimulant tablets and 15 kilo-grammes of opium.

The official said the main sus-pect was still not apprehended.

Myanmar has struggled to stem the tide of narcotics from its remote and violence-scarred border regions despite political reforms that saw Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party win historic elections in November.

The impoverished nation remains the world’s second largest opium producer after Afghanistan while cartels increasingly churn out methamphetamine tablets.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has said meth-amphetamine dominates the global market for synthetic drugs and is expanding significantly in Southeast and East Asia.

“It’s scary as drugs trafficking has been increasing and spread-ing around the country,” the senior drugs investigator in Naypyidaw said.

Last July, Myanmar has seized more than $100m worth stimulant tablets from a private container vehicle in northern Yangon.

Benin votes for new presidentAFP

COTONOU: Benin went to the polls yesterday to choose a new president from a record field of 33 candidates but with concerns about the distri-bution of voters’ cards that already forced a two-week delay.

Polling began at 0600 GMT in the tiny West African nation, with international observers assessing the atmosphere as “very calm and very relaxed”. Voting was due to end nine hours later.

Mathieu Boni, an official from a civil society group which has deployed more than 3,000 election observers, said “more than half” of the nearly 8,000 polling stations opened on time.

President Thomas Boni Yayi is bowing out after serving a maxi-mum two five-year terms, marking him out among some African leaders who have tried to change constitu-tions to ensure third terms.

The first results are expected within 72 hours of the vote.

Prominent candidates include Lionel Zinsou, the Franco-Beninese financier who stepped down as head of France’s biggest investment bank to become prime minister last year.

The 61-year-old is standing

for the ruling Cowry Forces for an Emerging Benin (FCBE) party and is widely viewed as Boni Yayi’s chosen successor.

He already has the support of two opposition parties but critics view him as an outsider “parachuted” in by former colonial power France.

Zinsou, who in the 1980s was a speechwriter for France’s social-ist former prime minister Laurent Fabius, cast his vote shortly before midday in the Cocotiers area of Ben-in’s commercial hub, Cotonou.

Two of Benin’s leading business-men, Patrice Talon, 57, and Sebastien Ajavon, 51, are also front-runners, pitching for the top job after previ-ously bankrolling presidential bids.

Other favourites include econ-omist Abdoulaye Bio Tchane and financier Pascal Irenee Koupaki, both 64, who were voting in the northern town of Djougou and Pomasse in the south.

With so many candidates, polit-ical analysts predicted no decisive result yesterday and believe who-ever wins in the northern region will determine the overall result.

Key issues in the election include job creation, tackling corruption, improving health and education, and the economy in the country, a major cotton producer. Farmer Emile Sosa was one of the first to vote in

Cocotiers, Cotonou, and said lack of opportunities for the country’s young people was a major problem.

“I want the next president to encourage the youth to take to agri-culture,” said the 49-year-old father of four.

The first round of voting had been due to take place on February 28 but was rescheduled because of delays in the production and distribution of the 4.7 million voters’ cards.

On Saturday evening, distribution of new voters’ cards had not started in two central states (Zou and Pla-teau) and had not been completed in several of the 10 others that make up the country.

The head of the independent electoral commission, Emmanuel Tiando, told reporters that both old and new cards would be allowed “to avoid any tense situations and allow all voters to take part in the ballot”.

In Zou and Plateau, voting was allowed with identity cards rather than voter cards, he added, prom-ising that all election material was available in polling stations across the country.

Voter Franck Tokannou said after casting his ballot in Cotonou: “This morning has been difficult for those who are organising it all but it seems that it’s going OK. Everything is in order.”

A man casts his ballot in the Benin presidential elections in Cotonou, yesterday.

Second possible part

found off Reunion

SAINT-DENIS DE LA REUNION: A resi-dent on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion who last year found a wing frag-ment from Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 said yesterday he had come across a sec-ond possible piece from the missing plane, reports AFP.

Johnny Begue, who found the “flaperon” part while cleaning a beach last July, said he handed over the new suspected object to police immediately after finding it last Thursday.

He said he was out jogging by the sea shore when he found the object measur-ing about 40 by 20 centimetres, which had a blue mark on the surface and was grey underneath.

Sri Lanka brings back

war-time checks AFP

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s police yes-terday re-introduced war-time road blocks and random checks on vehicles following a surge in gang-related shootings in the capital, a spokesman said.

More than 100 police stations in Colombo and its suburbs have been asked to erect snap blocks, a com-mon practice during the island’s separatist war that ended nearly seven years ago, police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekera said.

“The objective is to prevent seri-ous crime and drug smuggling as well as to catch those committing serious crime,” the spokesman said.

He said there was a surge in drug smuggling and shootings that prompted the authorities to take extraordinary measures.

At least three people were shot dead and many more wounded in Colombo in the past week in what police said was gang-related vio-lence. Unidentified gunmen had opened fire on a prison bus and

wounded a suspect who was being taken back to jail after a court hear-ing in the capital last week.

Another suspect on bail was shot dead at home while a woman was shot and wounded outside the main prison in Colombo Saturday after she visited her jailed husband.

Gunasekera said 10 special units were also established to crack down on gang activity that had increased in recent weeks.

Sri Lankan authorities had dis-mantled road blocks and stopped vehicle checks after the end of the decades-long Tamil separatist war in May 2009.

Even the permanent check points at key entry points to the city had been removed several years ago.

The new government which came to power in January last year removed the last remaining check point at the entrance to the former war zone as a sign of normality.

However, the new police meas-ure brought back memories of war-time Colombo when freedom of movement was curtailed due to frequent stops for security checks.

Reuters

DHAKA: Bangladesh’s elite anti-terrorism unit detained yesterday three suspected members of a militant group believed to be behind a spate of recent attacks in the south Asian country.

Muslim-majority Bangladesh has seen a rise in Islamist violence in which liberal activists, members of minority Muslim sects and other reli-gious groups have been targeted.

The detainees were members of the banned Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and were arrested in a raid conducted in the northwestern district of Rajshahi, said Rumman Mahmud, a deputy director of the Rapid Action Battalion. Sixteen crude bombs, seven petrol bombs and jihadi books were also found in their possession, he added.

The group is believed to be behind attacks such as the bombings of a Shia shrine and the killing of two foreigners.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for some of the attacks, includ-ing the killing of a Hindu priest last month, but the government has denied the militant group has a presence in Bangladesh. At least five militants of Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen have been killed in shootouts since November, as security forces stepped up a crackdown on Islamist militants seeking to make the moderate Muslim nation of 160 million a Shariah-based state.

Bangladesh arrests three suspected militants

Another MH370 crash probe interim report to be out tomorrow.

Indian fishermen board a train after being released from prison, Karachi, yesterday. Pakistani authorities released 86 fishermen who were arrested for straying into Pakistan territorial waters. The fishermen will be repatriated to their country via the Wagah border near Lahore.

86 Indian fishermen released

AFP

KANDAHAR: Overstretched Afghan forces are pulling back from violent southern districts without a fight, ceding key territory to the resurgent Taliban as part of an unprecedented “strategic retreat” that has stoked fears government control is slipping.

Beset by record casualties, deser-tions and troop shortages, Afghan troops have recently abandoned outposts in parts of central Uruzgan province, extending a withdrawal which began last month.

They have already pulled out of Musa Qala and Nowzad districts in neighbouring Helmand, bastions that foreign troops struggled for years to defend as the opium-rich region tee-ters on the brink of collapse.

The retreat has triggered fevered speculation about possible

government backroom deals with the Taliban at a time when international efforts are growing to bring the insur-gents to the negotiating table.

“Once you start pulling out troops and surrendering hard-won territory, you are basically admitting that the Taliban have won,” said Mohammad Ismail, a tribal elder from Musa Qala who fled the area after government troops pulled out.

“This is a betrayal to all those who have sacrificed their lives to defend these areas over 15 years.” The withdrawal has sparked con-cerns that the government is fast losing control of volatile Helmland.

The Taliban effectively control or contest at least 10 of the 14 districts in Afghanistan’s biggest centre for opium production, a lucrative source of insurgent funding which makes the province a hotly contested area.

But Afghan commanders dismiss claims of any Taliban deal, describing

the recent withdrawals as a “tactical” manouevre aimed at consolidating forces from isolated, hard-to-defend areas. “Those who are criticising the plan do not know the art of war,” defence ministry spokesman Daw-lat Waziri said.

Many of the hundreds of with-drawn forces have been redeployed to beef up a security belt around Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s capital which recently came close to fall-ing to the Taliban, officials said. But many experts reject government claims that the withdrawal quali-fied as a “strategic retreat”.

“This new strategy is effec-tively a surrender to the Taliban. That’s because there’s no reason to think that this territory will be taken back anytime soon,” said Michael Kugelman, Afghanistan expert at Washington-based think tank the Woodrow Wilson International Cen-tre for Scholars.

Afghan forces’ retreat from key districts stokes instability fears

Reuters

CESME: As the European Union and Turkey focus on stemming the flow of Syrian refugees attempting peril-ous journeys across the Aegean sea to Greece, another migrant community whose numbers are also swelling says it is being overlooked.

Largely denied the chance for legal resettlement in Europe and struggling to find work or support in Turkey, Afghans account for around a quarter of the migrants risking their lives in the small boats leaving Turkey’s shore. The EU executive has announced the first payouts from a $3.3bn fund meant to help Turkey cope with an influx of more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees and encourage them to stay put.

But while Afghans are unlikely to be prevented from using services such

as medical centres and education facil-ities set up in Turkey, the fact they speak Pashto and Dari, rather than Arabic, risks excluding them from projects designed for Syrian refugees, aid workers warn. Afghan migrants in Turkey said that over the past few years they had been denied interviews with UN refugee agency UNHCR that would formally determine their refugee status, a key step in the journey to being resettled.

Polat Kizildag, programme coordi-nator at ASAM, an organisation which registers asylum seekers in Turkey, said they were generally told they were ineligible because Turkey was the third country on their journey and the expec-tation was that they apply for refugee status in their second, in many cases Iran.

Human rights groups have said Iranian forces deport thousands of Afghans without giving them a chance to prove their asylum status. “We want

to stay (in Turkey) but ... there is no support here. It’s too expensive,” said Najebullah, 45, a father of four from Kabul waiting in Cesme, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, to make an illegal cross-ing to the Greek Island of Chios.

More than 63,000 Afghans came to Turkey last year, a sharp rise from 15,652 in 2014, according to ASAM, counting only those who registered. The exodus from Afghanistan has been prompted by an precarious security situation, with 11,000 civilians killed or injured in 2015, as well as widespread corrup-tion undermining faith in the future and a war-ruined economy that cannot pro-vide enough work for its population.

According to the European Com-mission, 64,109 asylum requests were registered in Turkey in 2015, more than 11,000 of them from Afghan citizens, but only 459 were concluded, either by granting or rejecting refugee status.

Afghans feel forgotten in Europe’s migrant crisis

Afghan refugees wait before travelling to the Greek island of Chios, in Cesme district, Izmir in Turkey, yesterday.

PAKISTAN 13MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Internews

ISLAMABAD: While the neighbour-ing India has one Aam Admi Party, Pakistan has around a dozen parties with either a prefix or suffix of Aam Admi (common man) registered with the country’s top election body.

In the ever-burgeoning list of political parties, the Election Commis-sion of Pakistan (ECP) has registered 321 recognised political parties while over two dozen more are in the proc-ess of registration.

A glance at the alphabetically ordered list on the ECP website shows around a dozen similar names like Aam Admi Justice Party, Aam Admi

Party of Pakistan, Aam Insan Move-ment, Aam Log Party Pakistan, All Pakistan Aam Admi Party, Aam Admi Party, etc.

All these parties have been reg-istered in recent years once a party with a similar name became famous in India. With a free-of-charge and open-for-all registration process, peo-ple have also registered parties with funny names like ‘Aap Janab Sarkar Party’, ‘All Pakistan Bayrozgar Party’.

While former military ruler Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf heads his own party with the name of All Pakistan Muslim League, there is another party registered with the name of ‘General Pervez Musharraf Himayat Tehreek’.

In the long list of parties, names of some known parties of the past are still present like the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal and Farooq Leghari’s National Alliance that ceased years ago.

They are enlisted because there

is no legal provision to delist a party once it gets registered with the elec-toral body. The commission can delist a party only if it gets a court order that it has been banned.

“The booming business of getting a party registered is a real headache for us, too,” an official of the ECP says. “We are way short of election symbols now compared to the number of par-ties we have.”

The ECP has a total of 156 elec-tion symbols and double the number of parties. Many among the non-seri-ous parties have reserved attractive symbols. Under rules, once a symbol is allotted to a party it cannot be allo-cated to another one unless the first party agrees to relinquish it in favour of the other.

“If it continues like this, we will have to use symbols like two arrows, two tigers or two bats since we are short of distinguishing symbols,” said an official who deals with allocating symbols to parties. “Ultimately seri-ous parties that [actually] take part in elections will suffer.”

Among these 321 registered par-ties, not more than 50 take part in the elections. Among the ones that par-ticipate in elections at some level, hardly two dozen have any vote bank in national, provincial or local governments.

Explaining the reasons behind the unchecked growth of political par-ties, ECP officials said getting a party registered was easy as all one needed was to propose a name, provide a

copy of the party constitution and list of its office bearers to the commission.

The officials claim the commis-sion had been asking governments to devise some mechanism to check the trend. Most recently it has proposed that a parliamentary com-mittee on electoral reforms modify some existing laws and even frame new rules.

The matter has yet to be taken up by the committee which has been working on a reforms package that was supposed to be completed by end of 2014.

Of the possible options to filter non-serious actors, officials suggest parliament can prescribe a mini-mum voters benchmark or a specific number of seats in any legislature.

Against India’s one, Pakistan has a dozen ‘Aam Admi’ partiesWith a free-of-charge and open-for-all registration process, people have also registered parties with funny names like ‘Aap Janab Sarkar Party’, ‘All Pakistan Bayrozgar Party’.

Internews

WASHINGTON: The US government has formally notified the intended sale of eight F-16 fighter jets to Paki-stan, taking a major step towards finalising the deal.

“This proposed sale contributes to US foreign policy objectives and national security goals by helping to improve the security of a strate-gic partner in South Asia,” said the notification published in the US Fed-eral Register.

Officials here say the notifica-tion is accompanied by a copy of the February 11, 2016 letter which the Defence Security Cooperation Agency wrote to speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan.

“We are grateful to the US administration and members of Congress for their acknowledg-ment of Pakistan’s decisive actions against extremists and terrorists and of the effective role the F-16s play in our counter-terrorism efforts,” said Pakistan Ambassador to US Jalil Jilani while commenting on the notification.

The notification estimates the total cost of the deal to be nearly $700m. The Indian government and some US lawmakers, however, are questioning Washington’s rationale that such an arms transfer will help combat terrorism. They claim the fighter jets will change the military

balance in South Asia and will ulti-mately be used against India.

In a policy justification, posted on the Federal Register, the US administration rejected this asser-tion. “The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region,” it argued, adding that the aircraft would improve “Pakistan’s capability to meet current and future security threats”. The administra-tion also noted that the additional F-16 aircraft would facilitate opera-tions in non-daylight environments and “enhance Pakistan’s ability to conduct counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations”.

The Obama administration also explained that the sale would increase the number of aircraft available to the Pakistan Air Force to sustain operations, meet monthly training requirements, and support transition training for pilots new to the Block-52, F-16 aircraft.

Implementation of the pro-posed sale would not require the assignment of any additional US government or contractor represent-atives to Pakistan. There would be no adverse impact on US defence read-iness either, it said.

An additional note to the House speaker said the sale was “necessary in furtherance of the US foreign pol-icy and national security objectives outlined in the Policy Justification”.

The administration also assured Congress that Pakistan “can provide the same degree of protection for the sensitive technology being released as the US government”.

The 30-day notice period for Congress expires on March 11, 2016 after which the deal will be final.

Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz said at a news briefing last week that Pakistan had initially requested for 18 F-16s, but because of financ-ing problems it was purchasing just eight. He said the F-16s were a criti-cal tool in the war against terrorism.

US notifies saleof 8 new F-16s to PakistanPakistan had initially requested for 18 F-16s, but because of financing problems it was purchasing just eight.

Internews

LAHORE: Pakistan Prime Min-ister Nawaz Sharif’s son Hussain Nawaz has called for conduct-ing an accountability process in the country’s Punjab province as well where his family rules the province.

Speaking to the host of Express News TV show Kal Tak Javed Chaud-hry, Hussain said his father, Premier Sharif, had never interfered in the accountability process. “If [Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf chief] Imran Khan proves that we have defaulted on any loan, the Sharif family will face punishment as stipulated under the law,” Hussain said.

“Imran only talks about default, but he should have some reference, like the name of the banks the Sharif family has alleg-edly defaulted against,” he added.

Regarding allegations that Sharif had curbed the powers of accountability institutions, Hussain said no such direction had been issued from the Prime Minister’s House to the National Accountability Bureau or any other investigation agency.

“If there are any issues in Pun-jab which need to be investigated, then there should be no bar on that,” he said. Hussain accepted that he owns flats on Park Lane, London, which belong to offshore companies Nesco Ltd and Nelson Ltd, saying that he only enjoys the benefits of these assets. He said these assets are run by a trust held by his sister Maryam Nawaz.

Hussain called on accountabil-ity bodies to try former president Pervez Musharraf, “otherwise every ruler will do as he pleases and leave”.

He said he forgave Musharraf for what he did to him. Mushar-raf is accused of persecuting the Sharif family after overthrowing the Pakistan Muslim League-N government in 1999.

Sharif’s son admits he owns flatsin London

Artist K Radhakrishnan performs as Duryodhana (a major character in the Hindu epic Mahabharata) in the play ‘Draupadi Kuravanchi’, a Kattaikkuttu performance from Tamil Nadu, in Mumbai, yesterday. Kattaikuttu is the theatre of the rural people in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu.

Ready to perform

SRINAGAR: A guerrilla of the separatist Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) outfit was killed in an ongo-ing gunfight with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir Kulgam’s district yesterday , police said.

“A Hizbul militant identified as Dawood Sheikh was killed in a gunfight with the security forces in Buchroo village of Kulgam district,” a sen-ior police officer said. .

The gunfight ensued after security forces, closing in on a house in Buchroo village after receiving specific infor-mation about two militants hiding there, came under heavy gunfire from the hiding militants, triggering the gunfight, the officer said.

Hizbul guerilla

killed in Kashmir

IANS

ROHTAK: “I have got RTGS (Real-time gross settlement systems) of Rs10 lakh in my account. With this amount I cannot even get my mall cleaned, leave alone rebuilding the entire thing. All my hard work of so many years has been reduced to rub-ble,” Suresh Sharma, the owner of Rohtak’s burnt down RN Mall, rued.

Sharma, like scores of others whose shops, business establishments

and institutions were looted and com-pletely burnt down in the mindless arson by Jat protesters in last month’s violent agitation for reservation, says that non-Jat community businessmen are uncertain whether they want to re-build their establishments in Har-yana or move out to other places.

Rohtak’s only McDonald’s out-let, which Sharma brought almost 18 months ago after a lot of effort, has been charred along with the multi-plex cinema halls, high-end gyms and other showrooms in the RN Mall. The mall’s staff, numbering over 100, stare

at a jobless future.“My estimated loss in the Mall

alone is over Rs7crore. Even I am job-less as of today. So is all my staff. We don’t even know where the money for re-building the whole thing will come from. The interim relief is hardly of any use. The government should com-pensate the whole loss immediately as the police and administration failed to provide security for our establish-ments,” Sharma said.

“I don’t understand how the Khat-tar government is going ahead with the ‘Happening Haryana’ investors’

summit when the existing ones have suffered losses of hundreds of crores. Who will invest in a state where such lawlessness prevails?” he said.

“They took away all computers and other equipment and burnt down the building. The loss at the college is around Rs4crore,” Sharma said. The arsonists specifically targeted establishments owned by people from non-Jat communities like Punjabis, Sainis, Brahmins and others, local traders point out.

The BJP government in Haryana, led by Chief Minister Manohar Lal

Khattar, having failed to contain the violence, is trying to give an impres-sion that it will compensate all losses suffered by people.

Much of this is being done ahead of the March 7-8 ‘Happening Hary-ana Global Investors’ Summit’ being held in Gurgaon.

“Haryana government has so far released an interim assistance of Rs20,04,75,291 (Rs20.04crore) to 1,537 persons whose properties were damaged in the recent agita-tion in the state,” an official claimed in Chandigarh.

IANS

RAJAMAHENDRAVARAM: BJP president Amit Shah yesterday said that he wants the party to emerge as a key force in the electoral battle in south India.

Addressing a public meeting in Rajamahendravaram, as Rajah-mundry is now called, he said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should spread to all regions of the country.

“Modiji has given slogan of Con-gress-free country. If we have to free the country from Congress, we have to ensure that be it north, south, west and everywhere region, the BJP flag should fly high and ‘vande mataram’ slogan is sung,” he said.

In Andhra Pradesh, where BJP is a partner in Telugu Desam Party-led government, this was the first public meeting of BJP after state’s bifurcation.

He asked BJP workers to take the party to every village and booth in the state and strengthen the organ-isation. “Those who say that BJP is a party of the north should know that the party unit in Andhra Pradesh is the strongest in the country,” he said.

He claimed that the BJP which started with 11 only members, is today the largest party in the world with 11 crore strong membership.

The BJP chief said that though

there are NDA governments at both the centre and in the state, their political rivals are making a false propaganda that the BJP-led government at the Centre is not extending necessary support to And-hra Pradesh.

During the last one-and-half years, Modi government has given schemes worth Rs1.40 lakh crore to Andhra Pradesh, he said.

Stating that Polavaram project is the lifeline of the state, the BJP leader said it was Modi government which is making it a reality by merg-ing seven ‘mandals’ (of Telangana) with Andhra Pradesh.

He said the state was selected under the project to ensure 24x7 electricity in every village. Listing out the initiatives, he said national highway works worth Rs65,000 crore were sanctioned for the state.

Shah said Kakinada and Visa-khapatnam were selected under smart cities project while the cen-tral government also released Rs1,500crore as initial assistance for development of new state capi-tal Amaravati. He said an industrial park at a cost of Rs.22,000 crore will come up in the state. HPCL refinery in Visakhapatnam will be built at a cost of Rs25,000.

He said it would take seven days for him to read the entire list of works sanctioned for the state dur-ing last one-and-half years.

IANS

NEW DELHI/AHMEDABAD: Fol-lowing intelligence agencies’ inputs about infiltration of 10 suspected ter-rorists into Gujarat, Delhi was also put on high alert yesterday as a pre-cautionary measure, police officials said.

“Delhi has always been on high alert. But the recent intelligence alert about the entry of some suspected terrorists in Gujarat is really a seri-ous issue following which a prompt message was circulated to step up security,” said a police officer on condition of anonymity.

The officer said that all the sta-tion house officers (SHOs) of over 180 police stations in Delhi have been asked to enhance security at busy markets, vulnerable places

and vital installations falling in their jurisdiction.

Delhi along with all metro cit-ies was reportedly put on high alert just hours after intelligence inputs about the infiltration of 10 suspected terrorists into Gujarat to carry out attacks against high-value targets.

Minutes after the alert, security across Gujarat was intensified and leaves of all police personnel were cancelled. Two NSG teams, com-prising nearly 200 personnel, were sent to Ahmedabad by the central government on the request of the Gujarat government.

The agencies suspect that the infiltrators belong to Pakistan as a fishing boat of the neighbouring country was seized by an Indian Border Security Force patrol team on Friday. Its occupants fled upon seeing them in the Koteshwar creek area off the Kutch coast along the India-Pakistan border in Gujarat.

NSG teams were put on standby and Mahashivratri festivities at the historic Somnath temple were sus-pended in Gujarat after the Centre yesterday sounded a high alert amid reports that 10 fidayeen militants have entered the coastal state.

“The Gujarat Police are on alert. The state government had asked the Centre to send National Secu-rity Guards (NSG) teams, which have also arrived,” state Home Minister Rajanikant Patel told reporters.

Two NSG teams, which landed in the state yesterday morning, were put on standby. He said, “We have issued a high alert and beefed up security at all key installations.”

Alert in Gujarat and Delhi over attacks threatDelhi along with all metro cities was put on high alert after intelligence inputs about the infiltration of 10 suspected terrorists into Gujarat to carry out attacks against high-value targets.

Jat agitation victims not happy with compensation

INDIA14 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Commuters walk past dumped tin containers near a recycle workshop in Kolkata. Thousands of poor families and migrants are working at recycle workshop in central Kolkata.

Walking by recycled workshop

Amit Shah wants to see BJP as key force in south

IANS

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Indian government will shift, out of Yemen, the Indian mother superior of an aid home in Aden where four nuns including were killed and an Indian priest kidnapped in an attack by gunmen on Friday, said Kerala Chief Minister Oomen Chandy.

Chandy said that after he spoke to External Affairs Minister Sushma

Swaraj on Saturday night, Indian embassy officials from Djibouti have established contacts with Sis-ter Sally, the mother superior of the old age home run by the Mother Tere-sa’s Missionaries of Charity, who hails from Kerala.

“I managed to speak to Sally a while ago and she said that she has been contacted by Indian embassy officials from Djibouti who are expected to come to take her with them on Monday. In her place (Yemen), there is no Indian embassy

or any officials.“She said that things are not that

smooth where she is and there is no information about the priest Tom Kuzhuvennal, who hails from Kot-tayam district and was taken away by these unidentified gunmen,” he said.

Chandy added that Sally was lucky to escape the attackers as she, along with a few locals, saved herself by hiding when these gunmen cre-ated mayhem.

He said that according to reports

that he got, these gunmen tied the arms and hands of the priest and took him with them.

“She also said that there is no information about the priest,” said Chandy.

In the gunfire, four nuns of the Missionaries of Charity, including one from India, were killed. The Indian nun has been identified as Sister M Anseleme, 57, from Jharkhand.

Of the other three nuns, two were from Rwanda and another from Kenya.

Aden aid home survivors will be evacuated: Chandy

PANAJI: Security forces were thrown into a tizzy yesterday after a phone call — which later turned out to be a hoax — regarding the presence of a bomb on an Air India flight from Delhi to Mos-cow via Goa. A thorough search was conducted of Air India Flight AI-156 carrying 89 passengers, including four foreign-ers, once the plane had landed in Goa. “A person who identified himself as Videsh Singh called the Calangute police say-ing he was informed by one ‘Rajan’ that there was a bomb aboard AI-156, which was due to land in Goa at 2pm,” a sen-ior police official said requesting anonymity.

Bomb hoax call

grounds AI flight

Tibetans living in exile attend the funeral ceremony of Dorjee Tsering, a teenager who had set himself on fire near McLeodganj, Dharamsala, yesterday. The 16-year-old Tibetan living in India died three days after he set himself on fire to protest against Chinese control of his homeland.

Tearful adieu to Tibetan boy

INDIA 15MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

IANS

IMPHAL: Joining hands ahead of elections in some northeastern states, the left parties called for unity among themselves to stamp out corruption and communalism from the region.

“The Left parties have shown the way in states like Kerala, West Ben-gal, Tripura, and other states could

emulate them,” Moirangthem Nara, secretary of the CPI’s Manipur unit, said here at the first state-level meet-ing of the Coordinating Committee of the Left Parties on Saturday.

He said the Left government in Tripura has shown that if there is polit-ical will, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, could also be lifted.

“There is no crusader like Irom Sharmila in Tripura. The Left govern-ment has brought about a sea change

and people are happy,” Nara, a former minister of Manipur, said.

Attended by the representatives of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), Forward Block, Revolutionary Socialist Party and CPI-Marxist-Leninist, the Left parties’ convention comes ahead of assem-bly elections in Assam in April and in Manipur early next year. Megha-laya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura

are also due for the assembly elec-tions in 2018.

Nara said the Left parties should particularly be concerned about Manipur where the Congress has “given a corrupt regime”.

“There is an urgent need for the Left parties to join hands in Manipur to save the state from the corrupt Con-gress party.”

He said the Manipur govern-ment has started talking about

implementing the Food Security Act without creating conditions for it.

“The Public Distribution System has been a failure in the state. There is apprehension among some sections that ministers, MLAs and hangers-on may get a free hand once the Food Security Act is implemented.”

Nara and other leaders also flagged the issue of communalism, observing that “there have been hun-dreds of communal clashes during the

two years of BJP rule in the country”. “The tribals and non-tribals

should stay in communal harmony and all sections of people should stay together as equals,” said the CPI leader.

Another CPI leader, Moirangthem Ibohal, took a poor view of the Manipur budget for 2016-17. “It is like a project report of an NGO and is not in the interest of the state and the people.”

IANS

KOCHI: Equally gifted in dancing and singing, popular Malayalam actor Kalabhavan Mani (pictured) could make his audience laugh and cry and did that for almost a quarter of century before his art was untimely stilled as he passed away at a private hospital here yesterday. He was 45.

Mani burst into the Malayalam film industry in 1993 by first mimicking practically every film star the indus-try has seen as part of famous mimicry troupe Kalabhavan - which earned him his prefix. He was however first noticed

in the film Sallapam in 1996 and after that, through his characteristic laugh and dialogue delivery style, never had to look back and went on to act in Tamil and Telegu films.

Mani proved his mettle in the film Vasantiyum Lakshmiyum Pinne Nja-num where he played the title role of a blind man which took him to greater heights and won him the special jury award at the national and the state level in 2000.

For the past few years, he was a busy actor in the Tamil films and was mostly seen playing villain roles and also doing more of character roles in the Malayalam industry.

Apart from acting in around 200

films, he sang in about 25 films and whenever he was called for a pro-gramme, was known for voluntarily singing ballads, which made him hugely popular. He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

His admission to a private hospital two days back was kept a secret and it was only yesterday that even the spe-cial branch came to know that he was unwell. He was reported to be suffering from liver and kidney-related ailments and was undergoing treatments.

Mani also had his share of getting into the news for the wrong reason, mostly for his rough and tough behav-iour which included alleged assaults of forest officials and customs officials

at the Kochi airport. With assembly elections round the

corner, there were reports the Com-munist Party of India-Marxist would field him from an assembly constitu-ency from his home district Thrissur.

Chief Minister Oommen Chandy condoled the unexpected demise and said that Mani will live through his bal-lads and the numerous characters he played, while his predecessor and vet-eran Left leader V SAchuthanandan said Mani excelled playing characters projecting tribulations of the weaker sections of the society. “He was bold enough to say that he was a strong Left sympathiser and his untimely loss is a huge loss to the film industry,” he said.

IANS

JAIPUR: Seven people have been arrested in connection with the burning alive of a 27-year-old woman allegedly by her fam-ily members for marrying a man from another caste eight years ago in Rajasthan’s Dungarpur district, police said yesterday.

According to police, the inci-dent occurred on Friday over 530km from here while Rama Kumwar was visiting her family to meet them along with her lit-tle daughter. “The woman, Rama Kumwar, after marrying Prakash Sevak of another community had eloped from her village Pachlasa in Dungarpur district around 8 years ago,” a police official said.

“After living somewhere else for all these years she returned to her village along with her three-year-old daughter to meet her family and in-laws.”

“Her brother Laxman Singh and other relatives who were still angry with her (Rama Kumwar), dragged her out of my house. They beat her up badly and burnt her alive. To destroy evidence, they cremated her late in the evening,” Kalavati, mother-in-law of Rama Kunwar, said in her police complaint.

Kalavati also claimed to have been beaten up badly when she tried to save Rama Kumwar.

“We have registered a case on her complaint and investigations are going on,” the official said.

“We have so far arrested seven people including her brother Lax-man Singh,” he added.

IANS

NEW DELHI: Laying stress on mov-ing towards women-led development, Prime Minister Narendra Modi yes-terday urged elected representatives to use technology to be more effective in their role and suggested creating a e-platform of women MPs.

Addressing the National Con-ference of Women Legislators, the Prime Minister said the country must think beyond “women development” and move towards “women-led development” and asked woman lawmakers to interact with pancha-yat and municipal representatives in their area as a step towards their “empowerment”.

He however did not mention the women’s reservation bill to which President Pranab Mukherjee and Vice President Hamid Ansari had referred in their speeches on Saturday.

The two-day conference, which concluded yesterday, was attended by women members of parliament and state legislatures and legislative

councils, union ministers and present and former chief ministers.

In her speech at the valedictory session held in the central hall of Parliament, former president Prat-ibha Devisingh Patil said children should be imparted values to respect women. She also stressed that women legislators should scrutinise provi-sions of gender budgeting.

Patil said women should be imparted training in self-protection and emphasised on their economic self-dependence. She said women legislators should come together in the fight against money and mus-cle power.

The first-of-its-kind confer-ence adopted a resolution which the participants resolved to work for transparent, accountable and inclu-sive governance and to contribute to task of building a Resurgent India.

In his address, Modi said there was need to change the psychological feeling concerning women empow-erment as empowerment is needed for those who are weak and not for those who are capable and strong.

“I am unable to understand who are men to empower (women). But the need is that we should understand our strength ourselves,” he said.

Noting that a country is enriched by the power of its women, he said multitasking, considered to be a very important element of modern day management, comes naturally to women.

Also noting his government had a large share of women ministers, he praised External Affairs Minister

Sushma Swaraj, saying her capabil-ity is widely recognised.

Congratulating Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan for her leadership and vision to organise the conference, he said in addition to the structured component of such events, experiences shared infor-mally among delegates were also extremely enriching.

“Women have higher success ratio despite the fewer opportunities they get in comparison to men,” Modi said, referring to Rwanda, saying that the east African country was brought back to its feet by women after mas-sacres in which a large number of men were killed.

He urged women to work more towards scrutinising bills in parlia-ment, saying they have a long-term perspective of events.

“I would urge Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, can you create an e-platform of women representa-tives,” he said.

Also admitting women are better in adopting technologies than men and “are specially gifted by god in this aspect”, he urged the women legislators to engage with their con-stituents using technology.

Shehnaz Ganai, a member of legislative council of Jammu and Kashmir who spoke before the con-cluding session, suggested that such conferences should be held in states, while former Delhi chief minis-ter Sheila Dikshit said that women must raise their voice to get 33 per-cent reservation in parliament and assemblies.

Woman burnt alive in honour killing; 7 held

Women-led development need of the hour: Modi

Left parties join hands ahead of polls in northeast and call to root out corruption

Popular Malayalam actor Kalabhavan Mani dies at 45

Empowerment is needed for those who are weak and not for those who are capable and strong, says Prime Minister.

IANS

HYDERABAD: Ravela Susheel, son of Andhra Pradesh Social and Tribal Welfare Minister Ravela Kishore Babu, was extensively grilled by police yesterday after he surren-dered in a molestation case. A court later sent him to 14 days judicial cus-tody.

Susheel appeared at Banjara Hills police station and surrendered after his lawyer failed to get him bail.

Police also arrested Susheel’s driver M Ramesh alias Appa Rao. Deputy Commissioner of Police Venkateswar Rao told reporters that both Susheel and his driver were questioned with regard to the

complaint lodged by a woman.Venkateswar Rao said police

were also examining the CCTV foot-age of the car in which Susheel was travelling. He also asserted that the government was taking all steps for protection of women. “There is no question of shielding anybody involved in a crime, no matter how powerful he may be.”

The accused were later taken to the government-run Osmania Hos-pital for examination. They were later produced before a magistrate at his residence in the evening and remanded in judicial custody for 14 days. The accused were shifted to Chanchalguda Central Jail here.

Police on Saturday issued notice to Susheel, asking him to appear before them within 48 hours.

Police grill Andhra minister’s son

A child tries to catch hold of the handlebars in a local train in Mumbai yesterday.

Tender hands aim high

A surfer paddles out to ride a wave on a day of swell generated by strong winds on the Mediterranean Sea in Varazze, Italy, yesterday.

Against the tide

The London Mayor denied any personal ambition to campaign for Britain to leave EU

AFP

MOSCOW: A jailed female Ukrain-ian pilot, who this week rejected food and water to protest delays in her controversial murder trial in Russia, is in “satisfactory condition,” her lawyer said yesterday.

Nadiya Savchenko, 34, is demanding she be repatriated to Ukraine after a judge in the south-ern Russian town of Donetsk on Thursday unexpectedly postponed her final address to court as her trial over the 2014 killing of two Russian journalists in east Ukraine nears an end.

“Nadezhda Savchenko is now in satisfactory condition,” one of her lawyers, Nikolai Polozov, said on Facebook, using the Russian version of her name. He said she was being constantly monitored and there was no need to force-feed her.

Savchenko has not been drinking water or eating since the trial was adjourned on Thursday.

Her supporters are concerned that by refusing to drink water she may damage her health irreparably

or not live long enough to attend the next hearing set for Wednesday.

Refusing both food and water is known in Russia as a “dry hun-ger strike” and was a method of last resort for some Soviet dissidents under Communism.

Polozov said that Russian human rights ombudsman Ella Pamfilova had informed Savchenko’s sister Vera of her condition after her representa-tives visited her in a detention centre.

A group of Ukrainian doctors are waiting for permission to also visit her, he added. Savchenko has fasted before to protest the accu-sations against her but has never before refused both food and water.

“She counts only on her pres-sure on the Kremlin,” her sister Vera said earlier this week. “She does not believe politicians.”

Irena Lesnevskaya, founder of Russia’s REN TV channel, yesterday appealed to President Vladimir Putin to let Savchenko go ahead of March 8 when Russia and Ukraine celebrate Women’s Day. “Do not humiliate Russia, its men, its officers who still know what honour is about,” Les-nevskaya wrote on Facebook.

Reuters

LONDON: London’s influential mayor yesterday denied personal a mbit ion wa s behind his decision to campaign for Britain to leave the European Union and said it was a “golden oppor-tunity” for the country to forge its own trade deals with the world.

Boris Johnson (pictured), whose backing for a so-called ‘Brexit’ has angered Prime Minister David Ca meron a nd highlighted the deep splits within his Conservatives over Europe, said he believed the risky option was to remain inside the 28-nation bloc when Britons vote in a June 23 referendum.

His comments came as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schae-uble warned Brexit would lead to years of tortuous negotiations and create insecurity that would be “poi-son” to the British, European and global economies.

No country has previously quit the EU, and a British departure would deprive the bloc of its number two economy and leading financial centre. Cameron says leaving would be a risky “leap in the dark”.

But Johnson said it would be a “huge weight lifted from British

business” and he did not believe banks’ “threats” to relocate from London if it happened.

“For the last few years I have said clearly if we didn’t get reform we should be prepared to walk away. I think we now have a golden opportunity to shrug off a regulatory legislative burden that is profoundly undemocratic,” he said in a BBC interview.

“We have got a once in a life-time opportunity, which will not come again, to strike a new series of relationships, free trade deals with the growth economies around the world, whilst maintaining ... our free trade advantages with the European

Union.”Cameron has

said he will not run again at the next election due in 2020, and many believe Johnson took the gamble that campaigning for ‘Out’ would boost his chances of suc-ceeding him. Twice elected to run Lon-don, he is among the country’s most pop-ular politicians and seen as one of the Eurosceptic camp’s

chief assets.Asked if he expected to be the

next prime minister, he responded: “Certainly not.”

As both sides accuse each other of scaremongering in an increasingly acrimonious debate, another leading ‘Out’ campaigner, Justice Secretary Michael Gove, told the Sunday Times that the EU’s treatment of Greece in its debt crisis had fuelled the rise of far-right “Hitler worshippers” across the bloc.

In the same paper, Johnson said the EU made it harder for Britain to carry out surveillance on terrorists. He criticised as “scandalous” reports that the head of the British Cham-bers of Commerce, which represents thousands of businesses, had been suspended for backing Brexit.

Swiss foreign

minister sees

EU immigration

deal near

Reuters

ZURICH: Switzerland and the European Union could strike a deal on curbing immigration to the neutral Alpine country soon after Britons decide in June whether to quit the bloc, Swiss Foreign Minis-ter Didier Burkhalter said.

His comments to the NZZ am Sonntag paper follow the cabinet’s unveiling of tough draft legislation that envisages unilateral limits on EU immigrants, a red flag for Brus-sels, should negotiations fail.

The talks are on hold until EU member Britain’s June 23 referen-dum of whether to stay in the bloc. Brussels is unwilling to show any flexibility in the talks that could encourage the British ‘Out’ camp.

Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga had said on Friday the two sides remained far apart, but Burkhalter said things could move quickly after the British decision.

“The fact that the EU is interested in a joint solution is evi-denced by the intense discussions we have conducted for a year. In my opinion we don’t have to nego-tiate much longer as we are close to a solution with the EU,” he was quoted as saying.

Switzerland is two-thirds of the way through a three-year timetable to enforce 2014 referen-dum vote in favour of immigration quotas which would violate a bilat-eral pact guaranteeing freedom of movement for EU workers.

Reuters

BRATISLAVA: Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico won Saturday’s parlia-mentary election, nearly complete results showed, but gains by opposi-tion parties including the far right will make it very hard if not impossible to form a new government.

If Fico fails to put together a gov-ernment led by his leftist Smer party, a group of centre-right parties could try to form a broad but possibly unstable anti-Fico coalition, a repeat of the 2010 election.

Fico, whose anti-immigration and socially conservative views are in line with neighbours Poland and Hun-gary, took 28.3 percent of the vote, far ahead of others but less than he had hoped for, results from 99.98 per-cent of voting districts showed.

With euro zone member Slovakia due to take over the European Union’s rotating presidency from July, giving

it a bigger role in EU policy discus-sions over the bloc’s migration crisis, the election is being watched closely in Brussels.

Fico bet on a combination of pop-ular welfare measures such as free train rides for students and pension-ers and his opposition to accepting refugees to secure a third term, after ruling in 2006-2010 and 2012-2016.

The results showed eight groups won seats in the new parliament, including four that were not in the outgoing one. Some factions rule out working with each other, especially with a far-right party that gained representation.

Some analysts raised the pros-pect of a stalemate that could lead to a minority or temporary cabinet.

Fico, who had hoped to rule with one smaller coalition partner, said building a new coalition in a highly fragmented parliament would take time and be tough, given the “very complicated” election results.

“As the party that won the

election we have the obligation to try build a meaningful and stable govern-ment,” Fico told reporters. “It will not be easy, I am saying that very clearly.”

Fico, who dismisses multicultural-ism as “a fiction”, has pledged never to accept EU-agreed quotas on relocating refugees who have flooded into Greece and Italy from Syria and beyond.

Slovakia has a tiny Muslim minor-ity. It has not seen any large numbers of refugees pass through its territory.

Opponents portray Fico as an inefficient and unsavoury populist who ignores the need to reform edu-cation and healthcare. However, most opposition parties in the predomi-nantly Catholic country agree with Fico’s hardline stance on migrants.

Refusal to provide guarantees for a bailout of Greece brought down the previous centre-right government in 2012. Both Smer-led and centre-right coalitions face huge obstacles, because either would have to include the centrist Most-Hid party popular among the Hungarian minority as

well as the mildly nationalist Slovak National Party.

Most-Hid refuses to work with the nationalists, the party’s chief Bela Bugar said, putting the faction that won just 6.5 percent in the position of a possible king-maker.

“This will be a more difficult birth than this country has ever experienced,” said Marian Lesko, a commentator at weekly Trend.

Slovakia is one of the euro zone’s most financially sound states, popu-lar with foreign investors, particularly car makers.

But unemployment of more than 10 percent and vast regional differ-ences in wealth, as well as corruption and low healthcare and education standards, have disappointed many voters. The dissatisfaction along with Fico’s bet on immigration fears may have brought votes to protest parties. The far-right radical People’s Party of central Slovak Governor Marian Kotleba won 8.0 percent, nearly three times more than predicted.

EUROPE / UK16 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Golden chance to stay out of EU: Johnson

Slovak PM wins but retaining power difficult

Ukrainian pilot’s condition

satisfactory: Lawyer

Reuters

MOSCOW: Russia’s defence budget will be cut by 5 percent in 2016, Rus-sian Deputy Defence Minister Tatiana Shevtsova said, said RIA news agency.

Defence spending has been grow-ing as part of a drive by President Vladimir Putin to restore Russia’s military might.

The decision to cut shows, how-ever, that even the armed forces are not immune to a slowing Rus-sian economy, which has been hit

by falling oil prices and Western sanctions, the news agency quoted Shevtsova as saying.

The 5 percent cut, if approved by Putin, would be the biggest reduc-tion in defence spending since he took office in 2000.

In 2011, while prime minister, he

announced plans to revitalise the Russian army and its aging equip-ment by spending 23 trillion roubles by 2020. Military interventions in Ukraine and Syria have made strengthening the military an even greater priority for the Kremlin.

The cut represents a victory for

the finance ministry, which has said Russia can no longer afford the multi-billion-dollar revamp of the armed forces and called for a 10 percent spending reduction across ministries.

The Russian economy shrank by 3.7 percent last year and is expected to decline by another 1 percent this year.

People take part in a rally demanding release of Ukrainian army pilot Nadezhda Savchenko by Russia in central Kiev, Ukraine, yesterday.

Russia will cut defence budget by 5 percent this year

Police and activists clash at a protest over a proposed building development in the national park of Tirana, Albania, yesterday. A group calling themselves ‘For the Park’ are protesting against a proposed building development where many trees will be cut down.

Protest for green cause

The EU will also push Ankara to drastically reduce the huge flow of migrants into Europe.

AFP

BRUSSELS: European leaders will push Turkey at a summit today to agree to “large-scale” deportations of economic migrants from Greece which is bracing for a fresh surge of migrant and refugee arrivals by the end of March.

The European Union’s 28 lead-ers are hoping for new commitments from Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu at their talks in Brussels in order to curb the chaos on the west Balkans route that begins in over-stretched Greece.

The EU will also push Ankara to drastically reduce the huge flow of migrants into Europe, as Turkey is the launch pad for most of the

more than one million refugees and migrants who have come to the con-tinent since early 2015.

On Saturday, European Migra-tion Commissioner Dimitris Avramapoulos said Greece—already struggling with a buildup of 30,000 migrants—was expected to receive “another 100,000” by the end of March. EU leaders will also try to increase aid for Greece which has seen non-EU Macedonia and EU countries on the Balkans route tighten their borders, stranding asylum seekers desperate to head northward to wealthy Germany and Scandinavia. Macedonia allowed just 240 people to cross the border with Greece between Saturday and early yesterday morning, Greek frontier police said.

Meanwhile, there are over 5,000 refugees and migrants waiting to cross to Greek mainland from Aegean islands facing Turkey, Greece’s state agency ANA reported yesterday.

Donald Tusk, the European Council president and summit host, said in his invitation letter that suc-cess depended largely on securing Turkey’s agreement at the summit for the “large-scale” readmission from Greece of economic migrants who

do not qualify as refugees.Syrians, who top the influx of

people into Europe, are considered genuine refugees requiring admis-sion under international law.

Brussels has meanwhile unveiled a plan for saving the passport-free Schengen zone, which has been jeopardised by several countries closing their borders to stop the huge influx of people. “For the first time since the beginning of the migration crisis, I can see a European consensus emerging,” Tusk said in his letter.

Following their lunch with Davutoglu in Brussels, EU leaders are to meet by themselves.

The EU said Turkey has made progress towards implementing a cooperation-for-aid deal clinched in November but added that too many people were still heading from Turkey to Greece, the main entry point to Europe. The European Commission, the EU executive body, said in a report that the daily average of irregular arrivals in February amounted to just under 2,000, which is “high” for

a winter month. In the report to EU summit participants, the commission said encouragingly that Ankara on February 26 approved 859 readmission requests from Greece.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, which currently holds the bloc’s rotating presidency, told reporters he hoped Turkey would agree “to accelerate readmission of third country nationals and economic migrants.” Rutte added: “I think that would be the minimum outcome.”

The commission report urged

Ankara to “swiftly negotiate and conclude readmission agreements with the relevant third countries,” which would then take back economic migrants from Turkey.

Rutte said, Europe could implement a more “ambitious” plan to resettle refugees directly from camps in Turkey, which hosts 2.7 million Syrian refugees. Under the action plan, the EU will give Turkey €3bn ($3.3 bn) to aid refugees on its territory and Turkey will crack down on people smugglers.

Reuters

PRAGUE: Greece could pay down its foreign debts by hosting deportation centres, giving Europe another option in tackling the migrant crisis, Czech President Milos Zeman said yesterday.

Zeman, speaking in a broadcast interview with Czech television chan-nel Prima, said the idea came from one of his advisers and called it “an original idea that could kill two birds with one stone”.

“Detention centres would be built on Greek islands to where migrants from Europe would be

deported ... and Greece would, by maintaining these detention centres, pay its otherwise uncollectible for-eign debt,” he said.

The Greek foreign ministry declined to comment on Zeman’s remarks.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, lashing out yesterday at

border restrictions that led to logjams, said Greece would press for solidarity with refugees and fair burden-shar-ing among European Union states at Monday’s summit.

Tsipras has accused Austria and Balkan countries of “ruining Europe” by slowing the flow of migrants and refugees heading north from Greece,

where some 30,000 are now trapped, waiting for Macedonia to reopen its border so they can head to Germany.

“Europe is in a nervous crisis,” Tsipras told his leftist Syriza party’s central committee. “Will a Europe of fear and racism overtake a Europe of solidarity?”

Central European leaders have

been sceptical about Greece’s ability to limit migrants, many of whom are fleeing war in Syria and elsewhere, and fear Turkey will not manage to stem the number of people crossing the Aegean Sea.

They have said a back-up plan to provide help to Balkan countries along the migration route is important.

Trump a threat

to peace and

prosperity:

Sigmar Gabriel

AFP

BERLIN: Germany’s Vice Chancel-lor Sigmar Gabriel said yesterday that US billionaire Donald Trump, frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, poses a threat to peace, social cohesion and prosperity.

Gabriel labelled the brash real estate mogul a “right-wing pop-ulist” who, like Marine Le Pen of France and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, promises voters unsettled by globalisation a return to a protected “fairytale world”.

“Whether Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen or Geert Wilders—all these right-wing populists are not only a threat to peace and social cohesion but also to economic development,” the cen-tre-left Social Democrat told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

“The right-wing populists promise their followers a return to a fairytale world where eco-nomic life happens only within the borders of their own nation,” said Gabriel, vice chancellor to con-servative Angela Merkel.

Gabriel, who is also economy minister, stressed that countries don’t prosper in self-imposed iso-lation and that, in export powers like Germany and elsewhere, “we need to make the effort to explain how to shape globalisation in a fair way”.

Merkel was asked in a sepa-rate interview, by Bild am Sonntag newspaper, to comment on Trump, and replied only that “I don’t know him personally”. Questioned about his harsh attacks on her liberal ref-ugee policy, which he has called “insane”, Merkel said that “I see no reason to reply to that”.

AFP

PARIS: French Prime Minis-ter Manuel Valls yesterday said he would push ahead with a controver-sial labour reform bill, but promised “improvements” to the proposed text after meetings with union and busi-ness leaders.

Unveiled in mid-February and greeted with howls of protest from trade unions, the plans would make it easier for companies to lay off workers.

“We have to improve and com-plete this draft law. But what we cannot do is maintain the status quo,” Valls said in an interview with the weekly newspaper Journal du Dimanche.

“(We) cannot stand still even for a second. This labour law means more transparency for businesses and more protection for employees,”

he said. The prime minister will meet with business and union heads from today, while a number of organisations have called strikes for Wednesday and demonstrations later in the month to protest against the plans.

Valls faces strong opposi-tion from the left wing of his own Socialist Party, while seven in 10 French are opposed to the changes, according to a poll. Another sur-vey showed two-thirds of people believe there will be widespread protests if the law is pushed through.

The reforms are part of gov-ernment efforts to combat record unemployment levels in a country where employers are loath to take on permanent workers, as letting them go can be near impossible.

But critics complain the meas-ures would dismantle one of the key job guarantees for French employees.

AFP

SAN SEBASTIAN/SPAIN: It’s a scene reminiscent of “Clockwork Orange”: a chair, large screen and cap of brain sen-sors with dangling cords await the next guineapig. In a room nearby, big vats of smelly goo are lined up on a table.

Several floors above this secure lab, a chef in a classroom plunges a green balloon full of cream cheese into a smoking bowl of liquid nitro-gen, one of the teaching techniques at Spain’s Basque Culinary Centre (BCC).

This gastronomy school in European culture capital San Sebas-tian is but one manifestation of a

four-decade culinary revolution that has made the northern Basque Coun-try famous for its traditional haute cuisine... and its more controversial, experimental counterpart.

“In many places in the world, there’s a certain degree of aversion to what we come up with,” says BCC collaborator Andoni Luis Aduriz, whose avant-garde Mugaritz eaterie is rated the world’s sixth best by Brit-ain’s influential Restaurant magazine.

“It seems that often, it’s identified as an exercise that harms tradition or puts it in question,” says the 44-year-old Basque chef.

“But in the Basque Country, there are a series of restaurants that have stepped out of the margins of this

tradition, trying to find new options.”From ice shavings with shrimp

juice to apple chunks covered in a mould-like substance, Aduriz and his team like to disconcert diners at Mugaritz—using a strong dose of science. Customers have for instance been treated to what looks like unap-petising rotting bread which has actually been injected with the fun-gus found in French Roquefort, giving it a mouth-watering cheesy taste.

But Aduriz’s experimental approach to gastronomy goes beyond his Michelin-starred restaurant near San Sebastian.

He and his chefs have worked closely with scientists of all kinds to find new cooking techniques or

textures, and determine how their discoveries can be used not only at Mugaritz but in the wider world.

Take bubbles. The team worked with a rheologist—who studies the flow of matter—to make them stable and edible.

The result? Chocolate or honey-flavoured bubbles, sometimes served with soap bar-shaped ice cream.

But the team realised this kind of texture-changing process could be used further afield—to vary food options for people who have trouble swallowing, for instance—and are working on developing such products.

Aduriz works closely with the BCC, which apart from teach-ing gastronomy also has a team of

nutritionists, chemists and cooks on site to conduct culinary experiments.

They measure the effect of what diners see on their brain activity, for instance, by showing them food images while they eat with a sensor cap on, to try and determine what exactly gives them visual and gusta-tory pleasure.

“We’re the result of a culinary evolution where innovation has held a very important role,” explains Joxe Mari Aizega, BCC director.

“Everything started here more than 30 years ago.”

Or in 1976, when restauranteurs Juan Mari Arzak and Pedro Subijana met France’s star chef Paul Bocuse at a Madrid round table.

EU to press Turkey to take back migrants

Refugees and migrants receive food at the camp at the buffer zone of Greek-Macedonian border, near Idomeni village, northern Greece, yesterday.

Greece can pay debts by hosting migrant centres: Czech President

French PM to go ahead with labour reform bill

Spain’s Basque Country - where haute cuisine meets science

EUROPE 17MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

AMERICAS18 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Reuters

WASHINGTON: Republican presi-dential contender Ted Cruz solidified his claim to be front-runner Don-ald Trump’s prime challenger by splitting four nominating contests with the real estate mogul, and both turned their attention to a crucial showdown in Michigan tomorrow.

The wins for Trump and Cruz on Saturday were a setback for the Republican Party’s most powerful members, who have largely opposed Trump and hinted that they prefer

Marco Rubio, a US senator who was shut out in the four contests.

“I think it’s time that he dropped out of the race,” Trump said of Rubio afterward. “I want Ted one on one.”

The Republican campaign now moves to Puerto Rico and contests in Michigan, Mississippi, Idaho and Hawaii tomorrow, where Trump will be looking to expand his lead in the battle to pick nominees for the November 8 presidential election to succeed President Barack Obama.

On the Democratic side, front-runner Hillary Clinton won on in Louisiana and rival Bernie Sand-ers won in Kansas and Nebraska in results that slightly expanded Clinton’s delegate lead over the US senator from Vermont.

Next up for Democrats is a contest in Maine and a nationally tel-evised debate from Flint, Michigan, a majority-black and impoverished city that has suffered a health cri-sis caused by a contaminated water supply.

The Republican race has been marked by a growing wave of attacks on Donald Trump from the Republican establishment, which has blanched at his calls

to build a wall on the border with Mexico, round up and deport 11 mil-lion undocumented immigrants and temporarily bar all Muslims from entering the United States.

The party’s establishment has not been much happier with Cruz, who has alienated many party leaders in Washington.

Cruz, 45, has called for the United States to “carpet bomb” the Islamic

State militant group and has pledged to eliminate the tax-collecting Inter-nal Revenue Service and four Cabinet agencies in the country.

Trump still has a substantial lead in the race for delegates who select the presidential nominee at the nominat-ing convention in July.

Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, said he thought the party’s nominee would

most likely be decided by voters before the convention, and that the party’s leadership did not intend to subvert the will of its members.

“There are no plans to undo the rules, or change the nomination process mid-stream,” he said in an interview yesterday with ABC News, downplaying the prospect of the first contested convention in decades.

He also spoke ruefully of the

sometimes adolescent language used by his party’s candidates, with Rubio calling Trump unattractive and incon-tinent, and Trump boasting at the last debate that his penis was not at all small, contrary to what Rubio had suggested.

“I would hope that at the next debate,” Priebus said, “things are improved over the last debate as far as tone and rhetoric.”

AFP

LOS ANGELES: Nancy Reagan (pic-tured), devoted wife and trusted confidante to late president Ronald Reagan who after his death became the most ardent guardian of his politi-cal legacy, died yesterday. She was 94.

The former first lady passed away at her home in Los Angeles from congestive heart failure, her spokes-woman Joanne Drake said.

She will be buried next to her husband at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, Drake said.

Late in her life, Reagan earned praise for many of the very qualities

that saw her savaged by critics dur-ing Ronald Reagan’s two White House terms from 1981-1989 —her fierce

protectiveness and outsized influ-ence on the president.

Perceived as regal and cold, she was feared by White House aides who often found themselves butting heads with her over policy and per-sonnel appointments. She made her own mark as first lady with her sig-nature “Just Say No” drug awareness campaign, launched in 1982.

But after leaving the White House, as she nursed Reagan through his descent into Alzheimer’s disease until his death in 2004, America softened its view of the former movie starlet.

Warm tributes noting Nancy Reagan’s steadfast dedication to her husband poured in as news of her death broke.

“Nancy Reagan was totally

devoted to President Reagan, and we take comfort that they will be reu-nited once more,” former first lady Barbara Bush said in a statement. “George and I send our prayers and condolences to her family.”

Added former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger: “Nancy Rea-gan was one of my heroes. She served as first lady with unbelievable power, class and grace and left her mark on the world. .”

Throughout her husband’s illness, Nancy Reagan emerged as the epit-ome of a loving wife, as well as one of the country’s best known advo-cates for stem cell research that might have saved her husband had a break-through been found in time.

President Reagan is viewed as

something of a patron saint of con-servatives and the patriarch of the modern Republican Party.

Born Nancy Davis in New York on July 6, 1921, she was the daugh-ter of an actress and a car salesman who abandoned the family soon after she was born. Her mother eventually remarried to a neurosurgeon.

In 1949, she went to Hollywood where she acted in B-movies and met her future husband.

They married in 1952 after Reagan divorced his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, beginning a marriage that has been described as a love story to rival any that the couple acted out on the silver screen. The pair had two children: Patti, born in 1952 and Ron, born in 1958.

Judges back graft

probe despite

concern over

Lula’s detention

Reuters

SAO PAULO: Senior judges in Brazil voiced concern over the detention of former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, even as they threw their support behind the sweeping corruption investi-gation that threatens to topple his embattled successor.

Lula’s three hours of question-ing in police custody on Friday was the highest profile development in the two-year-old probe focused on state oil firm Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras).

The detention of Lula, Brazil’s first working-class president and a hero to millions of his fellow cit-izens, shocked his supporters. His 2003-2010 government helped lift an estimated 40 million Brazilians out of poverty.

Supporters and opponents of the former union leader clashed outside his home on the out-skirts of Sao Paulo after Lula was detained by police.

Supreme Court Justice Marco Aurélio Mello said “nothing justi-fied the use of force” when police picked up Lula unannounced from his apartment. Even Justice Gilmar Mendes, who has publicly said there is strong evidence the ruling Workers’ Party used graft proceeds to fund electoral cam-paigns, called Lula’s interrogation in police custody a “delicate” sit-uation in O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper. The federal judge who ordered Lula to be brought in for questioning, Sergio Moro, said steps were taken to protect Lula’s image during the operation, and he expressed regret that it sparked violence.

Bloomberg

WASHINGTON: Hillary Clinton said there’s “no basis” for indicting any-one after one of her former aides was reportedly granted immunity in the US investigation of her use of a pri-vate e-mail server when she was secretary of state.

The Democratic presidential front-runner put a positive inter-pretation yesterday on reports that Bryan Pagliano, who helped set up the e-mail server in Clinton’s New York home, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors.

“I’m delighted that he has agreed to cooperate,” Clinton said. “I think we’re getting closer and closer to wrapping this up.”

During her tenure at State, Clin-ton used the private e-mail address

to send personal and work corre-spondence, which she has since said she regrets. She said she took such a step as a matter of conven-ience and exchanged more than 60,000 such messages from 2009 to 2013. About half were of a personal nature, she said. The resulting probe into whether the practice resulted in inappropriate handling of clas-sified communications has dogged her presidential campaign.

Clinton, who said that she has “been more transparent than any-body I can think of in public life,” also criticised government deci-sions to retroactively designate some of the e-mail traffic as clas-sified. She said it warrants “a hard look at the inter-agency disputes and the arguments over retroactive classification.”

Republicans have stayed on the attack over the e-mails.

A dog trainer leaves with a dog that was adopted by the police from a municipal anti-rabies centre in Saltillo, Mexico, yesterday. Stray dogs are adopted by the police from the centre and then trained to help the police patrol the streets, and search for drugs, explosives and weapons.

Taken for a new role

AFP

FLINT, UNITED STATES: The United States is known for trends like fat-free and gluten-free diets, but residents in Flint, Michigan are struggling with a much more serious concern: how to keep food lead-free.

For more than a year, the drinking

water in this impoverished former manufacturing hub has been contam-inated with lead, after water from the polluted Flint River caused pipes to become corroded.

Staying healthy amid the con-tamination has proven difficult, with simple, daily tasks like washing veg-etables or rinsing a pot able to cause lead exposure.

The crisis, which was first ignored

and then hushed up by government officials, was a key topic during a debate in Flint yesterday between Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

In the contamination’s wake, many Flint residents have been diagnosed with lead poisoning and more than 8,000 children have been reported exposed to lead, a harrow-ing statistic since it can irreversibly

harm brain development.Replacing all the corroded pipes

could take years and residents are unsure when they can expect their water to be safe again.

Authorities are distributing vast quantities of bottled water, an oper-ation that involves National Guard soldiers and hundreds of volunteers. They have also given away 108,000 water filters.

Most residents say they don’t trust the filters, after being burned by authorities who had falsely assured the public that the drinking water was safe until the contamination was exposed by citizen activists.

“I am afraid of this water. I do eve-rything with these bottles of water. I don’t want to die,” said Robert Cme-jrek, a 72-year-old retiree.

Chia Morgan, a social worker, said

she uses about 10 bottles of water to cook a meal. “You always have to go and make sure you have bottles of water in the house, it’s no longer a pleasure.” Families are facing a logistical challenge to constantly buy, transport, store and then recycle all those plastic bottles.

Cafes and restaurants are also trying to reassure customers that their water is safe.

With two wins, Cruz emerges Trump’s rivalThe wins for Trump and Cruz were a setback for the Republican members, who opposed Trump and hinted that they prefer Marco Rubio.

Former US first lady Nancy Reagan dies at 94

No basis for indictment in e-mail probe: Hillary

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz greets a woman at a campaign rally in Wichita, Kansas.

Lead-free water and food a daily challenge for residents in Flint

Acrobats perform “Aphrodite and the judgment of Paris” choreographed by the Spanish troupe La Fura dels Baus during the opening of the 15th Ibero-American Theatre Festival in Bogota, Colombia, yesterday.

Leen-Al Hayek holds up her trophy with Egyptian celebrity Tamer Hosny after winning “The Voice Kids” singing competition in Beirut, Lebanon, yesterday. With them are Iraqi musician Kadhim Al Sahir (front left) and Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram (rear second left).

Dazzling display

Voice Kids winner

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NAMIE, JAPAN: Shinichi Niitsuma enthusiastically shows visitors the attractions of the small town of Namie: its tsunami-hit coastline, abandoned houses and hills overlooking the radiation-infested reac-tors of the disabled Fukushima nuclear plant.

Five years after the nuclear disaster emptied much of Japan's northeastern coast, tourism is giving locals of the abandoned town a chance to exorcise the horrors of the past.

Like the Nazi concentration camps in Poland or Ground Zero in New York, the areas devastated by the Fukushima disaster have now become hotspots for "dark tourism" and draw annually more than 2,000 visitors keen to see the aftermath of the worst nuclear accident in a quarter century.

"There is no place like Fukushima -- except maybe Chernobyl — to see how terrible a nuclear accident is," Niitsuma said, referring to the 1986 accident in Ukraine.

"I want visitors to see this ghost town, which is not just a mere legacy but clear and present despair," he added, as he drove visitors down the main street of Namie, which lies just eight kilome-tres (five miles) from the stricken nuclear plant.

On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake off Japan's northeastern coast sparked a massive tsunami that swept ashore leaving 19,000 people dead or missing. Namie's residents were evacuated after the tsunami sent the nuclear plant into meltdown and none has yet been allowed to move back over radiation concerns.

Niitsuma, 70, is one of 10 local volunteer guides organising tours to sights in Namie and other Fukushima communities, including tightly regulated restricted areas. The volunteers take visitors through the shells of buildings left untouched as extremely high levels of radiation hamper demolition work. The guides use monitoring dosimeters to carefully avoid radiation "hotspots".

A tsunami-hit elementary school is another stop on the morbid tour. Clocks on the classroom walls are stopped at 3:38 pm, the exact moment killer waves swept ashore.

In the gymnasium, a banner for the 2011 graduation still hangs over a stage and the crippled nuclear plant is visible through the shattered windows.

Former high school teacher Akiko Onuki, 61, survived the tsunami that claimed the lives of six of her students and one colleague, and is now one of the volunteer guides.

"We must ensure there are no more Fukushimas," Onuki said of her reasons for wanting to show tourists her devastated former home. Chika Kanezawa, a tour participant, said she was "shocked" by conditions she saw. "TV and newspapers report reconstruction is making progress and life is returning to normal," said the 42-year-old from Saitama, north of Tokyo.

"But in reality, nothing has changed here."Dairy farmer Masami Yoshizawa still keeps

some 300 cows in Namie.They live off the radiation-contaminated grass

in defiance of a government order to have them slaughtered. As Yoshizawa showed the herd to the

gathered tourists, he explained he keeps the cattle alive in protest against plant operator Tokyo Electric Power and the government. "I want to tell people all over the world, 'What happened to me may happen to you tomorrow'," Yoshizawa said.

The disaster forced all of Japan's dozens of reactors offline for about two years in the face of public worries over safety and fears of radiation exposure.

But the government has pushed to restart reactors, claiming the resource-poor country needs nuclear power. English teacher Tom Bridges, who lives in Saitama, said he was able to share victims' anger and frustration through the tour.

"It's not a happy trip but it's a necessary trip," he said.

Some local residents still suffering from the

grief of losing loved ones and with no hope of returning home, say they have mixed feelings at seeing sightseers tramping through their former hometown.

But Philip Stone, executive director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at Britain's University of Central Lancashire, said recently that such tangible reminders of disasters serve as "warnings from history".

Niitsuma, who is from Soma, a coastal city some 35 kilometres (22 miles) north of the Fukushima plant, says he feels haunted by regret for not having been active in the anti-nuclear movement before the disaster even though he was against reactor construction. "I should have acted a little more seriously," he said.

"I'm working as a guide partially to atone."

Fukushima ‘dark tourism’ aids remembrance and healing

AP

LONDON: Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall celebrated their marriage on Saturday alongside family members, media executives and music stars in a church considered the spiritual home of British journalism.

The media mogul groom and model-actress bride emerged from St Bride’s church in Fleet Street after the service beaming in the London drizzle. Murdoch wore a dark blue suit, Hall an ice-blue silk Vivienne Westwood dress accompanied by silver shoes and a small bouquet of cream flowers.

Among some 100 guests at the

service were actor Michael Caine, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, artist Tracey Emin, playwright Tom Stoppard, Live Aid founder Bob Gel-dof and former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, as well as newspaper editors and executives, including Rebekah Brooks, chief of Murdoch’s British newspapers.

Also attending were the couple's 10 children. Murdoch, 84, has six chil-dren from three previous marriages, while 59-year-old Hall has four with her ex-partner Mick Jagger.

The couple officially tied the knot Friday in a civil service at Spencer House, an aristocratic palace built by ancestors of the late Princess Diana.

Hall and Murdoch reaffirmed their marriage vows at the hour-long

church service, which included music by Wagner, Schubert and Vivaldi and the hymns "Jerusalem" and "Amaz-ing Grace." Murdoch's son James read from the Bible's 1 Corinthians — a passage that declares "the great-est of these is love" — and Hall's son Gabriel Jagger read from ancient Chi-nese text the Tao Te Ching.

Australia-born Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp., and former supermodel Hall were introduced last year and announced their engagement in January.

This is the fourth marriage for Murdoch, who owns Fox News Channel, movie studio Twenty-First Century Fox, publisher HarperCol-lins and newspapers in Britain and the US.

Musicians and media figures

celebrate Murdoch-Hall wedding

Abandoned Tomioka Station in Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture, after tsunami disaster and accident of Fukushima nuclear plant.

A participant of "dark tourism" looks at cows which survive eating contaminated grass at a ranch in Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, after the accident of the nuclear plant. As the fifth anniversary of the disaster approaches, a growing number of visitors are joining Fukushima-related tours.

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Spotlight on Qatar as LNG being rerouted to Europe

By Satish Kanady

The Peninsula

DOHA: As falling Asian demand for LNG reroutes its supplies back to Europe, Qatar is back in the global market spotlight.

Qatar is the key swing sup-plier between the Atlantic and the Pacific basins as transport costs to North Western Europe and Asia are

roughly the same. As a result, when both basins receive spot LNG cargoes from Qatar, Asian spot LNG and UK NBP prices should trade in a relatively tight range of $0-2/MMBtu. This has been the case for most of the past 10 years, except in the 2011-14 period when Japanese nuclear shutdowns forced a rerouting of all disposable LNG from Europe to Asia, Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s latest global energy report noted yesterday.

Falling import demand in Asia means that LNG is being rerouted to Europe. LNG inflows to Europe increased by 16 percent in 2015, and are likely to rise even further this year. As such, global gas prices will have to adjust lower to incentivise Euro-pean operators to switch from coal to gas. UK NBP prices have already fallen through coal switching lev-els, as the UK coal to gas switching has been limited so far. Hence, Euro-pean prices may drop to 25p/therm (or $3.50/MMBtu) where switching into gas starts in Germany.

BofAML expects the Asian Spot LNG vs. UK NPB price spread to remain tight for years to come, and hence we expect both UK and Asian spot gas prices as a ratio of Brent prices to drop meaningfully this year. Put differently, global gas prices will stay weak for some time to come.

According to BofAML, LNG imports in Asia outright contracted in 2015, including in most of the major import-ers, namely Japan, China and Korea. Only India and Taiwan showed modest growth, though not enough to prevent big declines for the region as a whole. It expects Asian demand contrac-tions to continue into 2016 on a weak macro and strong growth in nuclear and renewable generation capacity. With two years of very strong supply growth ahead of us, all this LNG will go to Europe, at least in the short term, a phenomenon seen already in 2015.

“Europe is the only place where gas-fired power generation has mate-rial spare capacity. The excess LNG will then be dumped in the UK and

continental Europe,and global gas prices will have to adjust lower to incentivise the switch from coal to gas,” the BofAML said.

China’s LNG imports contracted for the first time ever in 2015. The contraction was marginal, yet repre-sents a drastic U-turn as imports rose sharply in prior years. In the past five years, pipeline and LNG imports have been the main supply source to meet strong growth in domestic demand. Pipeline and LNG imports now each account for 15 percent of Chinese nat-ural gas supply, up from virtually zero 10 years ago. Japanese gas consump-tion is contracting on restarting nukes. In Japan, Qatar’s major importer, gas burn is under pressure from the grad-ual restart of the country’s 48 nuclear reactors. So far, three reactors (3.5GW of capacity) are online.

BofAML’s Japanese utilities ana-lyst now sees the nuclear restarts as slightly more back-loaded than before, and expects nukes online to rise to 4.4GW by end of 2016 and

12.8GW by end of 2017. LNG burn in power generation fell 6 percent to 53 mmtpa in 2015 driven mostly by a 4 percent decline in power demand on efficiency gains. This year, LNG demand could contract by 2.1 mmtpa (or 4 percent) due to nuclear restarts alone, and by another 3-4 percent on

efficiency gains.LNG demand is also displaced

by nukes in South Korea, the world’s fifth-largest producer of nuclear power, with 24 reactors supplying roughly a third of the country’s power. Korean LNG imports are projected to decline this year.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatargas delivered its first Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) cargo under a new long term sup-ply agreement with Pakistan State Oil Company (PSO) to Port Qasim, Pakistan. The cargo was loaded onto Al Gattara, a chartered Qatar-gas LNG Vessel, which is owned and operated by Nakilat. The Vessel left Ras Laffan, Qatar on February 26 to mark the inaugural Q-Flex delivery to Pakistan.

With the addition of this mile-stone delivery to Port Qasim, the Qatargas chartered Q-Flex fleet achieved compatibility with 60 LNG terminals globally while the larger Q-Max vessels are presently compatible with 32 LNG terminals globally.

In April 2015, Qatargas

delivered the first commission-ing cargo to PSO onboard the LNG vessel Excelerate Exquisite, a Float-ing Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU) vessel, which is currently moored at the Engro LNG termi-nal in Port Qasim, and is Pakistan’s first LNG import terminal.

Qatargas Chief Executive Officer, Sheikh Khalid Bin Khalifa Al Thani said: “This is a signifi-cant milestone for Qatargas as we celebrate the first LNG cargo to Pakistan on a Qatargas vessel under the long term agreement. PSO is an important new cus-tomer for Qatargas and we are very pleased that the first Q-Flex cargo has been safely delivered. We would like to compliment and express our deep appreciation of Nakilat and our business partners in Pakistan for their tireless prepa-rations and professional support in achieving this milestone delivery.

We look forward to a safe and successful relationship with all stakeholders as we celebrate the successful first Q-Flex delivery of this important new agreement.”

This latest achievement by Qatargas followed many months of careful preparations in con-junction with ship-owner, the Port Qasim Authority (PQA). Prepara-tions included the development of new dedicated procedures for Q-Flex vessels and required the support of Master Mariners from Qatargas, the PQA Pilots.

The first Q-Flex LNG delivery to Pakistan under a 15-year sales and purchase agreement demon-strates the Company’s commitment and further strengthens the rela-tionship between both companies going forward. This achievement highlights Qatargas’ capability to supply LNG to customers around the globe both safely and reliably.

Qatargas-chartered Q-Flex LNG Vessel ‘Al Gattara’ moored at Port Qasim in Pakistan.

Qatargas delivers first LNG cargo to Pakistan State Oil Co

LNG inflows to Europe increased by 16% in 2015 and are likely to rise even further this year as import demand in Asia falling.

Woqod Chairman Sheikh Saud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani (right), Vice-Chairman Ahmed Saif Al Sulaity (second right), CEO Ibrahim Jaham Al Kuwari (left), with other members of board of directors at the AGM of the company in Doha yesterday. Pic: Salim M/The Peninsula

Woqod expects better growth in 2016By Mohammad Shoeb

The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Fuel (Woqod) yester-day held its Annual General Meeting (AGM) and approved the recom-mendation of its Board of Directors to distribute cash dividends of about QR692.57m according to a rate of 82 percent of the value of the paid-up nominal capital (QR8.2 per share), in addition to 8 percent bonus shares (8 shares per 100 outstanding shares).

The company’s net profit for 2015 touched QR1.2bn, up 11 percent, compared with the previous year. Earnings per share (EPS) increased to QR14.84 from QR13.41.

The meeting was chaired by Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahaman Al Thani, the Chairman of the Board of Directors. Total shareholder’s equity reached QR7.2bn with an increase amounting QR222m representing a growth of 3.2 percent compared with same period of last year.

“Seeing the first quarter perform-ance, we are expecting to maintain the same rate of growth and profits or even higher during the current finan-cial year,” Ibrahim Jaham Al Kuwari, CEO of Woqod told The Peninsula on the sidelines of the AGM yesterday.

“As we are going to open about 18 more additional fuels stations across the country, we are expecting higher revenues and profits. Besides that we have some specialised projects

such as improved fleet size of our transport services, which is another source of income for the company,” he added. “And also we have introduced new technologies such as the smart fueling and payment system named ‘WOQODe’ with significant invest-ments, which will bring additional income to the company.”

He said that the newly introduced ‘WOQODe’ system will not only gen-erate income for the company but also provide tight control over fuel usage and bills, especially to companies with big fleet size of vehicles.

Al Kuwari said that Woqod is cur-rently involved in implementation of many projects under construction, tendering, designing and approval stages.

LONDON: The US Commerce Department is set to place export restrictions on Chinese telecoms equipment maker ZTE Corp for alleged violations of US export controls on Iran.

The restrictions will make it difficult for the company to acquire US products by requir-ing ZTE’s suppliers to apply for an export licence before shipping any American-made equipment or parts to ZTE. According to a Com-merce Department notice that will be published next week in the US Federal Register, the licence appli-cations generally will be denied.

The restrictions will take effect tomorrow, and apply to any com-pany worldwide that wants to ship American-made products to ZTE Corp in China. Those companies are not the target of the export curbs on ZTE.

US govt to place

restrictions on ZTE

BUSINESS22 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Electric supercar wins young Croatian global fameAFP

SVETA NEDELJA: He’s the name behind the world’s first electric super-car, winning international plaudits for his ingenuity. But for Croatia’s 28-year-old Mate Rimac, it all started as a hobby in his garage.

A keen techie since high school, Rimac was racing an old BMW when he blew the engine and decided to turn the car into an electric one starting with pieces he bought on the Internet. A decade later, his firm Rimac Automobili is becoming a global leader in electric vehicle tech-nology, selling Concept One supercars for €850,000 ($923,000) each and giving a much-needed boost to Croatia’s start-up scene. “We want to be the best in the world in what we do and we are changing the world,” Rimac said in his factory showroom in the small town of Sveta Nedelja, near the Croatian capital.

The confident but modest entre-preneur was named by Politico Europe in December as one of 28 people across the continent who are “shaping, shaking and stirring Europe”. But mastering the complex technology of electric sports cars and winning financing was no easy task — especially in a small country of 4.3 million people with no automo-tive industry.

Rimac formed the company in 2009 when he realised there was not much left of the original vehicle he had transformed in his garage, and the aim was to build an electric supercar from scratch. “First we had

to create a team, then the know-how by trial-and-error method to even-tually become a company that could make a product,” he said.

The company unveiled the Con-cept One at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show, where nobody expected a small Croatian firm to showcase an electric car that could reach 100 km per hour in a staggering 2.8 seconds.

Last week at the Geneva Interna-tional Motor Show, Rimac introduced the production version of the car along with a prototype of its “evil twin”, the even more powerful Con-cept S. “We can’t really decide which Rimac creation we’d rather have, so we’re off to get lottery tickets with hopes of buying both,” said a review on motoring news site Autoblog.

Many expected Rimac’s success would lead him to move somewhere else, such as Silicon Valley, Germany or Italy. But instead he has kept the business in Croatia, a country slowly emerging from six years of recession.

“I want to do it here... I’m stub-born,” he said. “I think it is possible, I mean we are doing very well.”

He plans to build another factory in Sveta Nedelja, while his employee numbers are set to double this year to 300. Their average age is 30, and many are young engineers straight out of university.

They build most of the supercar parts from scratch on-site — from the body and chassis to the power distri-bution unit and batteries — sticking to Rimac’s philosophy of creating know-how and jobs instead of outsourcing.

“That’s why we are growing so quickly and becoming experts in dif-ferent fields,” said Rimac, who won

financing from three international investors in 2014 and is now in a sec-ond round of fundraising.

Two Concept One prototypes, including the red vehicle unveiled in Frankfurt, were on display behind Rimac, while nearby engineers worked on three cars to be delivered to the United States, Germany and Italy within a month. The firm is pro-ducing a limited quantity of just eight Concept One vehicles for clients who are both motor fanatics and technol-ogy afficionados — and can afford the hefty price tag. The supercar may be

Rimac’s headline product, but he says it is only a showcase for the compa-ny’s technology, from infotainment systems to battery packs, which aim to reach a far wider audience — in ordinary cars, planes, ships, bicycles and wheelchairs. “We are helping the world to go electric. Our business is to implement these technologies and help other industries to go electric.”

Spin-off firm Greyp Bikes, set up in 2013, produces high-performance electric bicycles that can reach up to 70 km per hour. So far around 80 have been sold around the world for

€8,500 each. Rimac said the company was not directly affected by Croatia’s problematic business environment, which sees companies burdened by excessive red tape and changeable fiscal rules. But he stressed that a bet-ter framework was needed to help the country’s young entrepreneurs, who only succeeded “either by themselves or despite everything”.

“We are creating our own little island here with positive young peo-ple... We are trying to be one of the sparks in Croatia that will trigger the change that is necessary,” he said.

Croatian inventor Mate Rimac, 28, poses next to his Concept One supercar model at his factory and showroom in Sveta Nedelja, on the outskirts of Zagreb.

ExxonMobil and RasGas to test gas sensor

The Peninsula

DOHA: ExxonMobil Research Qatar and project partner RasGas Company Limited (RasGas) are field testing an advanced second-generation dual sensor version of ExxonMobil’s Intel-liRed remote gas detection system.

The IntelliRed system, patent pending, provides a highly sensitive

and accurate early warning of hydro-carbon leaks and is designed to improve process safety and environ-mental performance at oil refineries, chemical plants, liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities and other gas process-ing facilities worldwide.

The remote gas detection system, which won the 2013 Qatar Petroleum HSE Excellence Innovation Award, has been deployed near LNG Train 7, in which ExxonMobil has a 30 percent participating interest. Field testing is expected to run through 2016.

“The dual imager IntelliRed remote gas detection system is a step forward in mitigating operational risks while improving reliability and ease of use,” said Hazem Abdel-Moati, Safety Research Lead at ExxonMobil Research Qatar. “The pilot project is designed to test the system’s durabil-ity and harsh climate performance by challenging it with various envi-ronmental conditions such as heat, humidity, dust, sand and fog.”

The system employs two infrared

cameras with a common optical path. One imager operates at a wavelength slightly offset from the other, allowing one imager to detect both hydrocar-bon and background signatures while the second imager detects only the background signature. Image subtrac-tion techniques eliminate background interference, which increases hydro-carbon plume detection accuracy, simplifies the autonomous computer vision algorithm and improves con-tinuous scanning of a given landscape for aerial surveillance applications.

Scientists from ExxonMo-bil Research Qatar and Providence Photonics developed the IntelliRed system over a four-year period, cul-minating in field tests of the system at production facilities in Qatar and the United States. In 2015, the Exxon-Mobil Upstream Research Company awarded Providence Photonics a glo-bal commercial license for the system.

“RasGas embraces its respon-sibility for the safety of people and the protection of the environment

as a core commitment. Therefore, the partnership between RasGas and ExxonMobil Research Qatar is a clear demonstration of our consist-ent efforts to implement innovative technologies that would significantly improve process safety, integrity of assets and enhance environmental performance of our facilities,” said Khalid Al Hemaidi, RasGas Chief Safety, Health, Environment and Quality Officer. “RasGas continues to seek opportunities that support Qatar’s drive for sustainable devel-opment,” he added.

“This pilot project emphasizes the continued commitment of ExxonMobil Research Qatar and RasGas to pur-sue research excellence in the field of process safety and environmen-tal protection. It is another example of the joint effort of ExxonMobil’s sci-entists and local partners to develop and commercialize cutting-edge technologies that enhance safety for personnel; integrity for facilities; and protection for the environment – all

elements that are fundamental for successful operations,” said Dr. Moha-mad Al-Sulaiti, ExxonMobil Research Qatar’s Research Director. “Exxon-Mobil is proud to build a world-class center of educational and scientific excellence, while simultaneously conducting research in areas that fur-ther Qatar’s National Vision 2030. We want to ensure that our efforts con-tinue to contribute to a brighter and more sustainable future for Qatar and its people,” he added.

ExxonMobil Research Qatar was established in 2009 to conduct research in areas of common interest to the State of Qatar and ExxonMobil, including environmental manage-ment, water reuse, LNG safety and coastal geology.

ExxonMobil Research Qatar became one of the first anchor ten-ants to open its doors at Qatar Science & Technology Park with a research and development center that includes offices, laboratories and training facilities.

Advanced detection technology system is designed to improve safety process and environmental performance at refineries. Grand Hyatt Doha

appoints new

Director of Rooms

The Peninsula

DOHA: Grand Hyatt Doha appointed Xavier Halbi (pictured) as the new Director of Rooms. Xavier brings more than a dec-ade of experience to his new role at the luxurious 249-room idyllic leisure retreat blessed with pictur-esque, breath-taking views of the Arabian Gulf

Xavier has been passionate about the hospitality world from a young age, which drove him to pursue a degree in hotel manage-ment at the hotel management school VATEL in Lyon, France before obtaining his MBA in Inter-national Hospitality Management from Cornell University and ESSEC Business School in 2004.

A French native with a service-oriented mindset, Xavier started building his career at the age of 19, when he got his first hospitality job in Lyon as a bell attendant and continued enhancing his skills in service in destinations as diverse as China, UAE, France, England and the Maldives. He started his Hyatt career at the Hyatt Regency Xi’an, China, as Guest Relations Manager and Assistant Manager Front Office and has been with Hyatt for 11 years.

Xavier worked as VIP Team Manager at Grand Hyatt Dubai then joined Hyatt Regency Dubai & Galleria as Revenue Manager and later on added Park Hyatt Mal-dives under his responsibilities. His most recent position was director of operational strategy at the same hotel. With his new appointment at Grand Hyatt Doha, where he has just arrived to inject a spark and inspire ongoing change, Xavier aims to turn the hotel into a bench-mark for exceptional service and excellence for hotels in Doha.

QSTP hosts tenant networking eventThe Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar’s primary incubator for technology development, Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP), part of Qatar Foundation Research and Development, recently hosted a networking event entitled ‘Business Connect’.

The workshop, aimed at creating an interactive environment condu-cive to networking and learning, was targeted towards senior members of QSTP’s resident-companies. The annual workshop was attended by department heads and QSTP Chair-man Dr Hamad Al Ibrahim.

Opening this year’s event, Hamad Al Kuwari, QSTP’s Managing Direc-tor, said: “Effective communication, knowledge-sharing, and building synergies among QSTP’s various member-companies are some of the main objectives we have set out to achieve. Together, all members of QSTP bring a quantifiable amount of intellectual potential to Qatar, which

serves as one of the foremost drivers in helping Qatar achieve a sustaina-ble knowledge-based economy built on technology research, innovation, and entrepreneurship.”

Al Kuwari said: “QSTP serves as the hub for applied research, innova-tion, and entrepreneurship to reach commercialisation of viable technol-ogy projects in Qatar. We are thrilled to announce that, through our mem-ber-companies, who have so far contributed 91 patents to the global technology market. I would like to use this opportunity to extend my gratitude to our esteemed member-companies who have been working diligently to make these unparalleled developments possible.”

In addition to its long-stand-ing partner companies, QSTP has recently welcomed on board pres-tigious international technology research and start-ups companies focused on various scientific fields. The new companies include Vetosis, Modus, Girnass, and Iberdrola, which will work alongside current members.

Santiago Banales, General

Participants at the workshop.

Manager of QSTP’s newest member, Iberdrola Qatar, said: “Today’s event was highly beneficial for us as a new member of QSTP’s family. We learnt a great deal about QSTP, its processes and expansions, which will prove to be helpful for us as we initiate and develop our projects in the future. We would like to see more of these events take place in the future to ensure a collaborative environment is created for technology innovation in Qatar.”

QSTP is set to expand their oper-ations with a new facility, TECH4, which is now under construction. The new 6,000 square-metre facil-ity, once completed, will allow QSTP to accommodate more tenants and offer them state-of-the-art accom-modation suitable for heavier testing and development.

Benefitting from the feedback of its current members, QSTSP has equipped TECH4 with various

facilities allowing heavy equipment and containers to be delivered to the tenants with ample allocated spaces, smooth access, and custom clearance, as well as double the power and ceil-ing height.

QSTP aims to provide world-class facilities and services to its current 36 resident-companies and over 1,200 employees to ensure their day-to-day business needs are addressed optimally.

BERLIN: Volkswagen AG’s current chairman and chief executive were alerted by the carmaker’s former CEO to the use of illicit emissions-control software in the United States two weeks before the car-maker disclosed the scale of its manipulations, Bild am Sonntag reported, without citing the source of the information.

Martin Winterkorn, who resigned within a week of Volkswagen’s (VW) biggest-ever corporate scandal becoming pub-lic on September 18, briefed VW’s executive board on September 8 that the carmaker had admitted the use of “defeat devices” to US authorities, the newspaper said.

Participants in the September 8 meeting included then-finance chief Hans Dieter Poetsch and then-CEO of Porsche, Matth-ias Mueller, according to Bild am Sonntag. They have since taken the positions of VW chairman and chief executive, respectively.

Former CFO Poetsch has been criticised by some investors and analysts for failing to inform VW’s shareholders of the looming prob-lem, with some of them demanding that VW select an independent chairman if it wants to overcome the crisis.

“Volkswagen is convinced to have fully complied with the requirements set out in the securities law,” a spokesman said. “Volkswagen categorically declines comment on contents of management board meetings.”

VW chairman and

CEO knew of

defeat devices

BUSINESS 23MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Development Bank (QDB) and Maersk Oil Qatar (MOQ) signed a Memorandum of Under-standing (MoU) last week, creating a partnership to support the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Qatar.

The MoU was signed by Abdulaziz bin Nasser Al Khalifa Chief Executive

Officer of QDB, and Lewis Affleck, MOQ’s Managing Director at the Qatar Business Incubation Center (QBIC), an innovation space and entrepreneur-ial support centre co-founded by the QDB.

Also in attendance were Troels Poulsen, Danish Minister of Business and Growth, Merete Juhl, Ambas-sador of Denmark to Qatar, Jakob Thomasen, CEO of Maersk Oil, Sheikh Faisal bin Fahad Al Thani, Deputy Managing Director of MOQ and Dr Aysha Al Mudahka, CEO of QBIC.

Abdulaziz bin Nasser Al Khal-ifa said:”We at Qatar Development Bank strive to empower and educate small and medium enterprises to nur-ture local market growth because of their importance in supporting and diversifying Qatar’s economy. Our cooperation with Maersk Qatar is a testament in cooperating with lead-ing businesses to help us achieve the

nation’s goals.”QDB seeks to improve local

capabilities that accelerate the development of Qatar’s private sec-tor in line with the needs of Qatar’s economic diversification towards a sustainable, competitive economy.

Speaking on the importance of the agreement, Lewis Affleck, MOQ’s Managing Director at the Qatar Busi-ness Incubation Center (QBIC) said: “By partnering with QDB we aim to build on our strong record of utilis-ing local goods and services to further support local business growth and to help achieve the Qatar National Vision 2030.”

He added: “In 2014 and in 2015, around 60 percent of all goods and services used by Maersk Oil Qatar were sourced locally. Together with the support of QDB we will seek to further identify and bring opportuni-ties to the Qatari SME market which

we hope will develop into meaningful contracts for local enterprises.”

Maersk Oil Qatar will also be participating in QDB’s Moushtarayat

conference and exhibition from March 8 to 10 at the Qatar National Con-vention Centre. The event provides a platform for networking between

suppliers and buyers and aims to provide local SMEs with access to pro-curement opportunities within local government and private enterprises.

QDB and Maersk Oil in deal to develop SMEs

QDB Chief Executive Officer Abdulaziz bin Nasser Al Khalifa (left) and Maersk Oil Qatar Managing Director Lewis Affleck signing the MoU.

Partnership to support the growth of small and medium enterprises in Qatar.

Ooredoo revamps Business Messaging ServiceThe Peninsula

DOHA: Ooredoo yesterday announced a pricing restructure for its popular Business Messaging Serv-ice, as it looks to offer more affordable solutions for Qatar’s growing busi-ness sector.

The Business Messaging Service is a mobile marketing tool that pro-vides companies with a cost-effective and efficient way to send bulk SMS to

large groups of people, and aims to reach out to customers and employ-ees in an effective manner.

Ooredoo has improved the pric-ing by increasing the value received by customers, reducing the local price of each package, and increasing the number of message recipients in each, in order to support the grow-ing small and medium enterprises sector in Qatar.

From now, businesses can sub-scribe to a range packages starting from 500,000 to 8,500,000 local

messages per month with monthly fees as low as QR30,000.

With this change, Ooredoo has become one of the most cost effi-cient Business Messaging Services options for any company in Qatar, and will enable SMEs and institutions to instantly promote their products and services, as well as stay in con-tact with their customers.

To ensure that enterprise cus-tomers also see the benefits of the revamp, Ooredoo’s Business Mes-saging Services ‘Unlimited’ bundle

will now see companies’ send up to 18 million SMS/Month, an increase of 5 million messages per month at no extra cost.

Ooredoo Business Messaging Service was designed to enable com-panies to effectively communicate with their customers and employ-ees; campaigns and new promotions, important corporate information, service payments, travel alerts and booking confirmation, voting and polling, and lots of different ways to increase their business.

Reuters

LONDON: Financial markets’ shaky start to the year shows they are los-ing faith in the “healing powers” of central banks, the Bank for Inter-national Settlements (BIS) said yesterday while voicing concerns over sub-zero interest rates and emerging economies.

The Swiss-based organisation, which fosters cooperation between central banks in the pursuit of mon-etary and financial stability, said that recent worries over China’s econ-omy, oil and commodity prices and some European banks had come as fundamental shifts take place in the global economy.

International bank-to-bank lending is contracting for the first time in two years, the use of dollar-denominated debt to drive growth in emerging markets has ground to a halt on a strengthening of the cur-rency that has also served to send US firms rushing to borrow in euros.

At the same time, world growth remains subdued, overall debt con-tinues to rise and negative interest rates in large parts of Europe and Japan suggest that some leading central banks are running low on ammunition to quell market vola-tility that could pose a threat to the global economy.

“The latest turbulence has hammered home the message that central banks have been overbur-dened for far too long post-crisis,” the head of the BIS monetary and economics department, Claudio Borio, said in its first quarterly report of the year. “Market participants

have taken notice. And their con-fidence in central banks’ healing powers has — probably for the first time — been faltering. Policymakers, too, would do well to take notice.”

The comments dovetailed with concerns about the potential side-effects of negative interest rates, which are effectively a charge on commercial banks’ spare cash.

A study in the BIS report showed the different ways negative rates were being implemented by the likes of Sweden, Denmark, Swit-zerland, Japan and the European Central Bank, which is expected to go even deeper into negative terri-tory on Thursday.

Evidence from Switzerland showed that banks there had not introduced negative rates on cus-tomers’ savings but had instead increased costs on loans such as mortgages to curb losses.

“If negative policy rates do not feed into lending rates for house-holds and firms, they largely lose their rationale,” the study said.

“On the other hand, if negative policy rates are transmitted to lend-ing rates for firms and households, then there will be knock-on effects on bank profitability unless negative rates are also imposed on deposits, raising questions as to the stability of the retail deposit base.”

The report also focused on another of the side-effects of the ECB’s rock-bottom interest rates.

There has been a 15 per-cent-a-year rise in the amount of euro-denominated debt issued by companies outside the euro bloc. If they neglect to put currency hedges in place, that represents some big bets on the euro remaining weak.

BIS: Faith in central banks’ healing powers faltering

Brexit would be economic poison for world: German Finance MinisterReuters

LONDON: A British vote to leave the European Union would damage the British, European and global econ-omies, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble (pictured) said in an interview with the BBC.

A British exit following a June 23 membership referendum would rock the EU by ripping away its sec-ond-largest economy and its richest financial centre. Prime Minister David Cameron has said Britain will be better off remaining in the bloc.

“We would have years of the most difficult negotiations, which would be very difficult for the EU as well. And for years we would have such insecurity that would be a poison to the economy in the UK, the European continent and for the global economy as well,” Schaeuble said, according to a translation of the interview broad-cast yesterday.

Schaeuble said that while Britain

would still be able to trade with the EU after leaving, it could not have the advantage of access to the bloc’s single market without accepting free movement of EU citizens or paying in to the EU’s budget.

He dismissed the idea that Britain could follow the example of countries such as Norway, which accepts free-dom of movement, pays contributions

to the EU budgets and applies the sin-gle market’s rules and regulations without having a vote on them.

“I cannot really see why the UK would be interested in staying within the single market without being able to make decisions about it,” he said. “It doesn’t really make sense.”

A collection of polls published by YouGov on Saturday showed that the ‘In’ camp has had four consecutive leads since February 25, averaging 40 percent support compared with 37 percent for ‘Out’. Its four previous polls put the ‘Out’ camp ahead.

The German finance minister said it would be a “catastrophe” if Britain left the bloc, but while the EU would be weaker without Britain, it would “not commit suicide”.

In response to a question about Turkey’s possible future accession to the bloc, he said the German gov-ernment had major doubts about whether it should become a full EU member. “It will be a long time before we reach the end of negotiations with Turkey,” he said.

BOSTON: Amazon.com Inc said it plans to restore an encryption feature on its Fire tablets after customers and privacy advocates criticised the company for qui-etly removing the security option when it released its latest operating system. “We will return the option for full-disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring,” spokeswoman Robin Handaly said.

Amazon’s decision to drop encryption from the Fire operating system came to light late this week. The company said it had removed the feature in a version of its Fire OS that began shipping in the fall because few customers used it.

On-device encryption scram-bles data so that the device can be accessed only if the user enters the correct password. Well-known cryptologist Bruce Schneier called Amazon’s removal of the feature “stupid” and was among many who publicly urged the company to restore it.

Officials at the honouring ceremony.

QP honours 831 long-serving staffThe Peninsula

DOHA: Qatar Petroleum (QP) hon-oured its 831 employees who have been serving the corporation for the past 10 and 15 years.

Held under the patronage of Saad Sherida Al Kaabi, QP President & CEO, the second part of QP’s Contin-uous Service Awards honoured 434 employees who have already recorded 10 years of service, and 397 staff who have been part of the corporation for the past 15 years. The awardees came from QP’s various directorates and departments, and they work in the corporation’s range of operational areas in Doha, Dukhan, Mesaieed, Ras Laffan, Halul Island and offshore pro-duction stations.

Addressing the event, Abdulaziz

Mohammed Al Mannai, Executive VP for Human Capital, said: “There is no doubt that the long service of our employees is the best testimony any organization can receive in describ-ing its standing as an employer. This is also a testimony to the success of our Human Capital policies not just in attracting talent, but also in nourish-ing and preserving them.”

Al-Mannai presented the awar-dees with a Certificate of Appreciation and a gift as a token of gratitude for their loyalty and many years of ded-icated service with the corporation. A number of QP Executive Vice Pres-idents and other senior officials then also took turns in distributing the cer-tificates and gifts, thus enabling them to congratulate the honored employ-ees from their respective directorates or departments.

Last week’s CSA Ceremony was

the second to be held by QP this year to honour its long-serving employees. It followed the first CSA Ceremony 2016, which was held on February 17, to recognise a total of 369 employ-ees who have already achieved career milestones of 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 years of service with the corporation.

In addition, as part of this year’s CSA programme, a total of 368 employees will also be receiving Cer-tificates of Appreciation for having completed five years of service thus far. All in all, a total of 1,568 male and female employees will be awarded in 2016 after serving the corporation between five and 40 years.

Organised by QP’s Public Relations and Communications Department in partnership with the Human Capital Directorate, the ceremony was held at the convention hall of the new QP Headquarters in West Bay.

Amazon to restore

encryption to

Fire tablets

after complaints

BUSINESS24 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Retailers invite rival brands to fill empty spaces

Reuters

LONDON: As online deliveries surge and shop sales fall, retailers are looking to refit their once bustling superstores with new attractions such as rivals’ fashion brands to fill empty spaces and keep shoppers coming through the door.

In a shift in strategy aimed at making the space profitable and avoiding store closures, retailers such as Tesco have also started experi-menting with gyms and children’s play areas to entertain customers.

“You’ve got more choice. It’s a bit like a shopping mall where you can

come and look at different things,” said healthcare worker Margaret O’Regan, who was browsing clothes from the privately-held Dorothy Per-kins, Burton and Evans brands in a huge Tesco store in Woolwich, south east London. The brands have 20,000 square feet of the store’s 120,000 sq ft, replacing space previously taken up by Tesco’s toys, stationery and tech-nology offer, some of which are now only available on its website.

In the four months since the brands went in, shopper numbers at the Woolwich store have risen.

A Tesco spokesman said the changes at Woolwich were illustrative of Tesco Chief Executive Dave Lewis’ strategy to turn around the business, giving shoppers more choice so they start to see superstores as the most convenient way to shop again.

“We are always looking at new ways our stores can meet the needs of local customers. We’re pleased with the feedback from customers in Wool-wich who tell us they like the store’s convenient range of fashion options,” he said.

Thousands of small shops have disappeared from British towns in recent years, unable to compete with the lower costs and prices of online outfits and bluechip retailers such as

Tesco and Marks & Spencer could join the exodus. “The UK is very advanced in terms of online shopping,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of retail research firm Conlumino. “As other regions catch-up with that they will experience similar problems and sim-ilar issues.”

In the UK online sales as a per-centage of total sales rose to 15.2 percent in 2015 from 13.5 percent in 2014, according to the Centre for Retail Research, compared with 11.6 percent in Germany, 8.0 percent in France and just 2.5 percent in Italy.

Britain’s supermarket sector alone added around 35 million sq ft between 2007 and 2014 even as online shop-ping rose and the digital shift looks unstoppable.

Sainsbury’s, Britain’s second big-gest supermarket, has acknowledged that it now has around 6 percent excess space, or about 1.5 million sq ft.

A big part of the rationale for its £1.3bn proposed takeover of Argos-owner Home Retail is to bring Argos concessions into its stores to absorb this space. “The coming together of the two organisations would allow us to optimise the space and optimise the space quickly,” said Sainsbury’s Chief Executive Mike Coupe.

The Argos concessions will

complement other moves by Sains-bury’s to exploit under-utilised space through existing partnerships with Jessops, the photographic shop, and Timpsons, the shoe repair and key

cutting firm.Tesco has also struck deals for

third party outlets with firms such as Sports Direct, Mothercare, Claire’s Accessories and Sock Shop and is

testing gyms and soft play areas in some stores. Similarly Wal-Mart’s Asda recently agreed a deal to give space over to Decathlon, the sports equipment and sportswear retailer.

A customer walks past Arcadia group concessions in a Tesco Extra store in Woolwich, southeast London.

Digital mapping consortium in expansion talks: Daimler CEOReuters

ESTORIL: Daimler’s Chief Executive Dieter Zetsche (pictured) said that a German auto maker consortium which controls the HERE digital map-ping business is in talks with potential new members.

In August last year, German car-makers BMW, Audi and Mercedes, agreed to pay €2.5bn ($2.8bn) to buy Nokia’s high definition maps business, in a step to develop self-driving cars. The deal closed in December and the German auto makers Mercedes-Benz, Audi and BMW started negotiations with new potential members, Zetsche said in an interview.

“If there are individual compa-nies that are already raising their finger, then this is fast and pleasing. I do not think it will take very long until the first company gives a bind-ing commitment to join,” Zetsche said at a Mercedes-Benz driving event in Portugal.

The HERE mapping business needs additional investments to make it viable for use as a naviga-tion tool for self-driving cars. Having more carmakers join the consortium will potentially spread the cost across more members and could improve the volume of live traffic information being fed to the map from vehicles on the road.

Last week carmakers Renault-Nissan, and supplier Continental said they were considering taking a stake in the HERE mapping consortium.

Intelligent mapping systems like HERE’s are the basis on which

self-driving cars, linked to wireless networks, can perform functions such as recalculating a route to the nearest electric charging station or around a traffic jam or accident.

Talks with third parties only started in the past two months because the consortium waited until the deal closed before talking to other partners, Zetsche said. Having only three members in the consortium made negotiations to close the deal simpler, Zetsche said. “Interest will not only be limited to Renault-Nis-san and Continental,” Zetsche added.

Self-driving and connected car services could become a $50bn mar-ket, analysts at Exane BNP Paribas have estimated. Germany’s carmak-ers decided to club together to bid for the asset to accelerate plans for self-driving cars after Internet rival Alphabet unveiled a prototype auton-omous vehicle.

Now Daimler is ready to expand the business which will form the basis

for interactive maps which include live data on traffic flows gathered by thousands of sensors on BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz vehicles.

“It is clear that we want to aggres-sively expand this platform, we will make the means available to do this,” Zetsche said.

There are talks with the telecom-munications industry about how to spread the availability of ultra-high-speed 5G networks, Zetsche said.

Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi are also evaluating whether their cooperation on maps can be broad-ened, Zetsche said. “When it concerns navigation, we have broadly identi-cal needs. Setting communication standards, which language we should speak and what signals we send, we can decide together,” Zetsche said.

Daimler is on the lookout for soft-ware and information technology specialists to help develop its digital businesses, including through further takeovers.

China’s economy isn’t

headed for a hard

landing: NDRC chiefReuters

BEIJING: China’s economy isn’t headed for a hard landing and isn’t dragging on the global economy, China’s top economic planner said yesterday, but uncertainty and insta-bility in the global economy do pose a risk to the country’s growth.

China on Saturday acknowl-edged it faced tough battle to keep world’s No.2 economy growing by at least 6.5 percent over the next five years while pushing hard to create more jobs and restructuring state-owned enterprises.

The comments, as Beijing kicked off its 12-day annual national par-liament, underscored the challenges facing China as its economy transi-tions from an investment and export focused economy to one based more on services and consumption.

“China will absolutely not expe-rience a hard landing,” Xu Shaoshi, head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), told reporters at a briefing. “These predictions of a hard landing are destined to come to nothing.”

China’s economy grew 6.9 per-cent in 2015, the slowest pace in a quarter of a century, but still com-fortably the fastest among major economies.

It has set a growth target of 6.5 percent to 7 percent for this year, introducing a band rather than a hard target as it seeks greater

flexibility in juggling growth, job creation and restructuring of a host of “zombie companies” in bloated industries. Premier Li Keqiang out-lined a series of targets on issues such as energy consumption, job creation and inflation but few details on how they would be met.

Many investors had been hop-ing China would post an aggressive target for fiscal spending to prop growth. But the draft goal of run-ning a fiscal deficit equivalent to 3 percent of GDP, while up from the previous year’s target of 2.3 percent, disappointed some.

Xu emphasised that China will work to improve the “efficiency” of government investment, suggesting a desire for more targeted spending.

That would be a contrast to the last stimulus injection after the glo-bal financial crisis when Chinese local governments built ghost cit-ies, roads to nowhere and airports to juice growth.

China has massive foreign exchange reserves of more than $3 trillion to tap if needed, but a sharp decline in reserves in the past 18 months as Beijing sought to support its yuan has rattled some investors.

Central bank Vice-Governor Yi Gang reiterated Beijing will keep the yuan basically stable and there was no basis for continued depreciation.

The state of China’s economy and Beijing’s ability to manage it were key talking points at a Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank-ers in Shanghai last month.

IMF employing stalling tactics and arbitrary estimates: Greek PMAFP

ATHENS: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras yesterday said the IMF was employing “stalling tactics” and “arbi-trary” estimates to hold up a reforms review crucial to the country’s eco-nomic recovery.

The leftist PM said the Washing-ton-based global lender was bent on counter-productive cuts that failed to take into account the improved per-formance of Greece’s economy. “The review will be completed soon in spite of the IMF’s stalling tactics,” Tsipras told his party’s central committee. “For the first time, there is substantial convergence... between the Greek side and European institutions,” he said.

Greece and the EU now see eye to eye on the pace of reforms, the state of the 2016 budget and fiscal

requirements to 2018, he said.In contrast, the IMF had “unre-

alistic expectations” “unrevised and erroneous calculations,” Tsipras said.

The Greek economy in 2015 saw output fall by just 0.2 percent, after an August forecast of a drop of up to 2.0 percent, the government says.

Athens also closed the year with a small primary surplus instead of an expected primary deficit, Tsipras said.

“Numbers are numbers...this is not a technocratic disagreement, it is a political disagreement,” the PM said.

Greece’s international creditors — the EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund —completed a first phase of the review nearly a month ago, but there has been little progress since. Athens is hoping that a meeting of the 19-nation eurozone today will authorise senior EU-IMF auditors to return later in the week. Athens is eager to complete the

reforms review to unlock debt relief promised by its European peers. But the IMF’s European zone head last month warned against “over-opti-mistic assumptions (which) will soon cause fears (of a Greek euro exit) to resurface once again and stifle the investment climate.”

A major sticking point is a pen-sion reform planned by Tsipras’ leftist government which the IMF has found insufficient. The IMF worked with the EU on two previous bailouts for Greece since 2010 but the Washing-ton-based lender said it would not participate in the third rescue plan without credible reforms and an EU agreement to ease Greece’s debt burden. In July, Greece accepted a three-year, €86bn European Union bailout that saved it from crashing out of the eurozone, but imposed strict conditions such as fresh tax cuts and pay cuts.Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras at the Maximos Mansion in Athens.

Retailers such as Tesco have also started experimenting with gyms and children’s play areas to lure customers from online shopping.

DUBAI: Network Interna-tional, the largest payments processor in the Middle East and Africa, could begin work-ing with some of Iran’s largest banks this year, the com-pany’s chief executive said yesterday.

The company is in talks with the banks about how it could begin processing debit, credit and other payment transactions without breach-ing the remaining economic sanctions against Iran, CEO Bhairav Trivedi said.

He declined to name the Iranian banks, beyond say-ing that they are among the country’s largest public and private lenders.

“We believe there are a lot of opportunities in Iran to expand our market, but we are not leaping into anything blindly,” Trivedi said. “If we can cross our Ts and dot our Is from a regulatory standpoint, then I would like to say yes, we can initiate this year.”

For several years, Iran was largely frozen out of the global banking system by economic sanctions over its disputed nuclear plans. In January this year world powers led by the United States and the European Union lifted most sanctions in return for curbs on the nuclear programme.

But foreign banks and payments companies have remained wary of re-estab-lishing ties with Iran because some US sanctions remain and US banks are still prohib-ited from doing business with Iran directly or indirectly.

That has made many foreign institutions fear they could still be targeted by US officials or face legal prob-lems in the United States if they resume business in Iran.

“There’s still some doubt about how the sanctions and US dollar clearing will work in practice,” Trivedi said. “We are evaluating the propos-als to create a structure that works.”

Some Iranian banks were clients of Network Interna-tional before sanctions were tightened in 2011. Network International is 51 percent owned by Dubai’s largest bank Emirates NBD, with the remainder held by private equity firms Warburg Pincus and General Atlantic.

UAE payments

company in

talks with

Iranian banks

BUSINESS 25MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Reuters

LONDON: New rules to hold bosses responsible for wrongdoing at Brit-ish banks is deterring some bankers from taking on senior management roles and even prompting big-hitters to play down their own importance, say legal and compliance experts.

Public anger that so few senior bankers were punished after tax-payers bailed out the industry in the financial crisis, or for scandals such as Libor and currency-market rigging, has led to the rules which make it eas-ier to hold them to account.

The Senior Managers Regime (SMR) from today replaces a sys-tem that UK lawmakers criticised for giving illusory control over individuals with little prospect of enforcement action. A step change in banking rules, it will allow regu-lators to pin blame on named people rather than just firms, which law-yers said has triggered anxiety among top bankers.

“I have had some clients with staff resistant to being a senior manager, worried they are going to be kept awake at night about what their team is doing, and if something goes wrong, will they be the scapegoat,” said Sarah Henchoz, an employment partner at Allen & Overy law firm.

Unlike the old system, bankers deemed to wield significant mana-gerial influence will have to sign up to a legal duty of responsibility for their units, and show they took reasonable steps to prevent or stop rulebreaking that comes to light.

They include CEOs, heads of big business units, and non-executive directors who chair key committees and will amount to about 10,000 staff across 900 banking companies, or an average of about 12 per firm, rising to 40-50 for the biggest lenders.

Ron Gould — a former UK regu-lator who is now European Chairman of Compliance Science, which helps financial companies comply with rules — said some senior bankers were looking at whether they could convince regulators that they did not

have significant managerial influence over their teams. “One thing I have seen that does make me smile is the wonderful term used by some firms that want to ‘juniorise’ positions,” Gould said. “It may be more wishful thinking than anything else.”

One person familiar with how the SMR is being introduced said regu-lators were aware of this and were pushing back against banks that fail what the person described as the “sniff test” — or too many sen-ior managers saying that they did not have full responsibility over teams but simply reported to other more senior managers. But such attempts at cre-ating a chain of senior managers to blur direct accountability were not widespread, the source said.

Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority, which will both enforce the regime, declined to comment.

Asked if bankers were balk-ing at the new rules, Simon Hills, an executive director at the British Bankers’ Association, said the SMR

was regarded in the industry as a key element to restoring trust in banking.

“I talk to senior managers at banks who say it’s been a useful exer-cise, enabling banks to check and confirm they have got the right peo-ple in the right roles and clarify job descriptions where necessary.”

The United States and other Euro-pean countries have not gone as far as the SMR by holding senior man-agers personally responsible by law.

Requirements in the rules for sen-ior managers to demonstrate they took steps to prevent or stop rule-breaking will also prompt bosses to document all delegation of tasks and to archive emails to help keep them in the clear if misconduct is uncov-ered, lawyers said.

“You need to be clear that you have a document trail on how you delegated responsibility, how you supervised key parts of the busi-ness, that you know in five years’ time exactly what you did,” said A&O’s Henchoz.

Adrian Crawford, employment partner at Kingsley Napley, which

advises individuals in the financial sector, said more senior managers might have been held responsible for the Libor-rigging scandal if the SMR had existed in past years.

“We have heard anecdotally that some banks now have a lawyer present at every meeting ... and that as a result decision-making is becoming increasingly bureaucratic,” he said. “This is good for the protection of the individuals but not so good for the competitiveness of the City.”

Few lawyers expect regulators to make any major enforcement moves in the early days, but said they would eventually want to bare their teeth.

“It only applies to conduct on or after 7 March, so we are unlikely to see enforcement action under the SMR for at least 18 months or so,” said Elly Proudlock, counsel at WilmerH-ale’s UK investigations and criminal litigation team.

Compliance adviser Gould said that while some bankers were gen-uinely frightened, others were blase, viewing this as simply another set of rules from regulators.

Bankers jostle to be junior in Britain

A June 2014 file picture of a BMW i8 plug-in hybrid sports car at the BMW world delivery centre in Munich, southern Germany. BMW celebrates its 100th birthday today.

BMW turns 100 today

Reuters

GENEVA: After a century building what it calls the “ultimate driving machine”, BMW is preparing for a world in which its customers will be mere passengers, and the cars will do the driving themselves.

A day before BMW’s 100th birth-day, its board member for research and development described plans for a completely overhauled company, where half the R&D staff will be com-puter programmers, competing with the likes of Google parent Alphabet to build the brains for self-driving cars.

“For me it is a core competence to have the most intelligent car,” Klaus Froehlich said at the Geneva auto show. As a high tech world opens new business opportunities, BMW sees its competitors as including firms like internet taxi service Uber and sales

website Truecar, which Froehlich described as “new intermediaries”.

“Our task is to preserve our busi-ness model without surrendering it to an internet player. Otherwise we will end up as the Foxconn for a company like Apple, delivering only the metal bodies for them,” Froehlich said.

BMW will have to ramp up quickly, striking deals with a new net-work of suppliers, many from outside the traditional automotive industry. “We have some catching up to do in the area of machine learning and arti-ficial intelligence,” Froehlich said.

Today, software engineers make up just 20 percent of the 30,000 employees, contractors and supplier staff that work on research and devel-opment for BMW.

“If I need to get to a ratio of 50:50 within five years, I need to get man-power equivalent to another 15,000 to 20,000 people from partnerships with suppliers and elsewhere,” Froehlich said, adding that German schools are not producing enough tech engineers for BMW to hire them all in house.

As software becomes as important as hardware, another cultural shift could see BMW free up resources by licensing out technology produced by its own engineers, such as drive-trains for electric and hybrid vehicles. “Going forward we will sell electric drivetrains,” Froehlich said. “We see many smaller manufacturers who

cannot afford to develop a plug-in hybrid.”

Germany’s premium carmak-ers are at the centre of the country’s global reputation for meticulous engi-neering. Chancellor Angela Merkel will attend BMW’s birthday bash at its Munich headquarters today. But with the expected shift in focus from a car’s body to its brains, the risk is that the expertise will accumulate in silicon valley or in China, rather than Ger-many’s carmaking regions of Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemburg.

“In the auto industry the battle will be not for horsepower but brag-ging rights will be ‘my car is more autonomous than your car’,” said Manuela Papadopol, director, global marketing automotive for Elektrobit, a software company now owned by Continental.

BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen’s Audi are each making an effort to build a hub for automotive software and services. They clubbed together to buy digital map maker HERE from Nokia last year to cre-ate a neutral platform where smart cars can share data on road and traf-fic conditions.

BMW’s own recent hiring included a 200-strong digital innovation team in Chicago, most of whom had worked for Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone pioneer.

Among the areas Froehlich

Chancellor Angela Merkel will attend BMW’s birthday bash at its Munich headquarters today.

identified where BMW will still need partners is in cloud computing, the technology of storing data and soft-ware remotely and accessing it over the internet. Data gathered from a car’s onboard sensors will be com-bined with remote information, for

example about weather and traffic, using next generation mobile net-works, also known as 5G.

The ultimate aim would be to build as much expertise in-house as possible, although there could be mutual benefits from working with

new outside suppliers. “The thinking here is: they too have weaknesses and there may be some win win sit-uations,” Froehlich said of potential new suppliers. “Nonetheless I need to build our own in-house competence in the next 5 to 6 years.”

Reuters

BEIJING: China aims to keep energy consumption within 5 billion tonnes of standard coal equivalent by 2020, it said in its five-year plan published on Sat-urday, marking the first time the world’s second-biggest economy has set such a target.

China has long been consid-ering an energy consumption cap in a bid to improve industrial effi-ciency, tackle smog and control greenhouse gas emissions, which are the highest in the world. Beijing is also pushing structural reforms to decouple economic growth from energy consumption.

“Energy consumption will be less than 5 billion tonnes if Chi-na’s structural adjustment goes smoothly,” said Xi Fengming, an expert on carbon emissions at the China Academy of Sciences, add-ing that the planned launch of a nationwide carbon emissions mar-ket next year would make it easier to achieve.

However, with energy demand growth already slowing consider-ably and China overshooting its 2011-2015 energy efficiency tar-gets, there might have been room to lower the number further, researchers said.

Yang Fuqiang, senior advisor at the US-based think tank, the Nat-ural Resources Defence Council, said the 5 billion figure was cal-culated by combining China’s 6.5 percent economic growth projec-tions for 2016-2020 with its target to cut energy intensity by 15 per-cent over the same period.

“Based on my experience the government plans are conserva-tive,” he said. “There could be a higher 18 percent cut in energy intensity, and that means energy consumption could be kept at about 4.8 billion tonnes.”

The China Energy Research Society (CERS), a think tank, said in a report published last week that it expected energy consumption to reach 4.8 billion tonnes of stand-ard coal by 2020 and rise to 5.3 billion tonnes by the end of 2030.

“We should see this (5 billion tonne) target as a ceiling rather than a floor,” said Zhou Dadi, an energy policy researcher at CERS. “Maybe we can achieve better results.”

Total energy consumption was 4.3 billion tonnes of standard coal in 2015, up 0.9 percent from the previous year, according to the most recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

Pilot shortage hits US regional airlinesAFP

NEW YORK: Mid-sized and regional airlines in the US are suffering from a pilot shortage that could threaten the health of the broader US aviation industry.

The labour shortfall has led to canceled flights at carriers like Mesa Airlines and Silver Airways. That has hit smaller airports, such as in Redding, California, or Erie, Penn-sylvania, according to figures from the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA).

The staffing crunch could also con-strain traffic for larger companies like United Airlines and Delta Air Lines that depend on the mid-sized companies to serve rural consumers and feed cus-tomers into their networks.

“It’s becoming a crisis at some carriers, resulting in the cancellation of flights and other serious disrup-tions,” said Patrick Smith, a pilot who runs “Ask the Pilot,” an aviation blog.

Republic Airways, which oper-ates flights for Delta, United and American Airlines, filed for bank-ruptcy protection last month, citing the labour crunch. “We’ve attempted to restructure the obligations on our out-of-favor aircraft — made so by a nationwide pilot shortage — and to

increase our revenues,” said Bryan Bedford, Chief Executive Officer of Republic Airways. “It’s become clear that this process has reached an impasse and that any further delay would unnecessarily waste valuable resources of the enterprise.”

Things at Republic came to a head last July, when the airline acknowl-edged cutting four percent of its flights due to a dearth of pilots. Delta subsequently filed suit against Repub-lic, alleging breach of contract.

Aviation industry insiders cite a number of factors for the drop-off in pilots: longer working hours, contentious relations with man-agement, fewer job protections and industry turnover with the expected retirement of some 18,000 pilots through 2022. But the biggest factor is compensation.

Regional carriers pay pilots an average of $27,350 per year, according to Paul Ryder, a captain at ExpressJet Airlines who is active with the ALPA. That compares with an annual salary of $103,390 at large airlines, accord-ing to US Labour Department data. Aspiring pilots must pay between $150,000 to $200,00 to obtain their license, Ryder said.

Three years ago, US regulators stiffened the requirements on pilots following a 2009 Colgan Air crash

near Buffalo, New York, that killed 49 people.

Commercial pilots must now have 1,500 hours of flight time before quali-fying for their pilot’s license, compared with just 250 prior to the rule shift. Adding to that burden is a shift in the broader aviation industry as regional flying has grown. Up-and-coming pilots once viewed the regional carriers as a stepping-stone to a job with a bigger company, said Smith.

“Today, the regional sector

accounts for half or more of all flying, and pilots are realizing that a job with a regional often means an entire... career with a regional,” Smith said.

“Fewer pilots are willing to com-mit hundreds of thousands of dollars into their training and education for a career with such a limited return on investment, in what has histori-cally been a very unstable industry.” Steps taken by some regional carriers include boosting compensation, such as offering a bonus to qualified pilots

of $80,000 spread out over four years, said industry consultant Kit Darby.

Companies are also granting bonuses of $500, $1,000 or $1,500 for pilot referrals, Darby said. “An airline that wants to be able to recruit new pilots and to retain its current pilots needs to offer reasonable compensa-tion, fair worklife balance and some career path with stability,” said pilot Ryder. “An airline that does not offer that typically has seen challenges in attracting employees.”

The staffing crunch could also constrain traffic for larger companies like United Airlines and Delta Air Lines.

China sets cap

for energy

consumption

for first time

High rise residential buildings are seen in Hong Kong yesterday. Property prices in Hong Kong, famous for its sky-high rent and super-rich tycoons, have more than doubled in six years due to record low interest rates and a flood of wealthy buyers from mainland China.

HK property prices double

BUSINESS26 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Bloomberg

DUBAI: Abu Dhabi stocks entered a bull market, leading Mideast gauges higher, as rising oil prices added to growing bullish sentiment across glo-bal equities.

The ADX General Index climbed 3.1 percent at the close, extending the longest winning streak this year and taking gains since a January 21 low to 22 percent. Dubai’s DFM General Index, which entered a bull market

last month, increased 2.9 percent and Kuwait’s SE Price Index added 0.7 percent.

Brent crude rallied a fifth day on Friday, the longest winning streak since November, and stocks climbed after US employers added more jobs than projected and Nigeria’s petro-leum minister said Opec members and Russia may meet to discuss capping output later this month.

Governments in the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council rely on income from crude to fund spend-ing, and stock markets often move in tandem with oil prices.

“Lots of expectation has been built into the potential meeting at the end of the month, and that helped oil kick on,” said Julian Bruce, the head of institutional trading at EFG- Hermes UAE Ltd in Dubai, a unit of the biggest publicly traded Arab investment bank.

“Relatively encouraging moves across the emerging-market space” and globally are also boosting the rally in the United Arab Emirates’ markets, he said.

Brent crude rose 4.5 percent to $38.72 per barrel on Friday, the highest level in three months. Emerg-ing-market equities posted their best

week since December 2011 and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index had a third straight weekly advance.

First Gulf Bank PJSC, the lender with the biggest weighting on the ADX General Index, led the advance as it jumped 4.7 percent. Emirates Tele-communications Group, the company with the second-biggest weighting known as Etisalat, added 3.6 percent

The rally sent the index above its Upper Bollinger Band, a sign to some traders that the gauge may decline. It also lifted the ADX’s 14-day rela-tive strength index to 78, well above the threshold of 70 that some inves-tors use to determine if a security is overbought.

The Bloomberg GCC 200 Index, a gauge of the region’s 200 biggest and most liquid companies, added 2 percent to the highest level in two months. The positive sentiment in the region came despite an announce-ment from Moody’s Investors Service on Friday in New York that it was placing more than 10 oil produc-ing nations on review for potential downgrade.

Moody’s cut Bahrain to Ba1, the highest junk rating, and placed it on review for a further downgrade. Still, Bahrain’s BB All Share Index

advanced for a third straight day, ris-ing 0.1 percent.

Arabtec Holding Co. was the most traded stock in Dubai, extending its steepest weekly gain in seven years. Traders exchanged about 304 mil-lion shares in the builder, six times the six-month average. The stock rose 13 percent to the highest level since October.

The stock market in Qatar was closed for a national holiday. The QE Index is about 1 percent from a so-called bull market, having risen 19 percent since a recent low on Jan-uary 18. The nation’s credit rating was affirmed on Friday by Standard & Poor’s, which said it expects Qatar to maintain its large net- asset posi-tion and infrastructure investment to support growth through 2019.

Still, Moody’s placed the country on review, citing its dependence on hydrocarbons and the affect of the oil price slump on the government’s bal-ance sheet.

Kuwait Food Co led the advance in Kuwait. The operator of KFC res-taurants in the Middle East and North Africa known as Americana has been valued at about $4bn by an investor group seeking to buy the company, according to people with knowledge

of the matter. While the stock gained 4.6 percent, the most in a month, less than 13,000 shares changed hands.

Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul All Share Index climbed 2.9 percent to the high-est level in two months, even after a senior central bank official said on Thursday that the kingdom’s eco-nomic growth will likely fall below 2 percent this year. Expansion last slowed below that level in 2009, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“Saudi and regional markets are taking a cue from rising oil prices as Brent crude closes in on $40 per barrel,” said Muhammad Faisal Pot-rik, the head of research at Riyad Capital.

“News from Moody’s on down-grading some countries in the region and putting others on review for a downgrade has largely been ignored today. The market has rallied well, but can undergo some technical correc-tion if the oil price stalls.”

Emaar Economic City gained 2.2 percent to the highest level since July after the company’s chief execu-tive officer said it plans to double the number of residents in King Abdul-lah Economic City to 10,000 this year.

Egypt’s EGX 30 Index rose 2.1 percent to the highest level since

January 12. About 329m Egyptian pounds ($42m) of shares were traded, compared with a one-year full daily average of 445m pounds.

“It is just a spontaneous rise fueled by the jump in oil prices and GCC gains,” said Mohamed Radwan, the head of equities at Cairo-based Pha-ros Holding.

Businesses in the country are struggling to import materials and to transfer profits. Egypt reached an initial agreement with airlines to help them repatriate funds, the civil avi-ation ministry said on Thursday. The nation’s net foreign reserves advanced in February, according to data on the central bank website.

Orascom Telecom Media & Tech-nology jumped 5.3 percent, the most in more than a month, on volume exceeding the stock’s three-month average.

The company, majority owned by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, will complete the 924m Egyptian-pound acquisition of investment bank CI Capital by the end of this month, he said in an interview yesterday. His plan to merge it with Beltone Financial would create the country’s second-biggest investment bank.

Rising oil prices spur Gulf bourses’ rallyThe stock market in Qatar was closed for a national holiday. The QE Index is about 1 percent from a so-called bull market, having risen 19 percent since a recent low on January 18.

AFP

FRANKFURT: The European Central Bank will almost certainly announce new stimulus measures at its policy meeting next week, analysts said, as eurozone inflation turned negative and the economic outlook continues to cloud over.

After disappointing financial markets with what were widely to perceived as half-hearted measures in December, ECB chief Mario Draghi will announce bolder policy moves this time round, central bank watch-ers predicted.

These were most likely to include a further cut in interest rates, an increase in the volume of bonds it buys each month under its so-called quantitative easing or QE programme and a further extension of that meas-ure beyond its current timeframe of March 2017.

“The ECB has signalled a further loosening of monetary policy at its forthcoming meeting,” said Capi-tal Economics economist Jonathan Loynes. “And while December’s under-deliverance highlights the risk of another disappointment, the dete-riorating economic outlook should persuade the governing council to be bolder this time,” the expert said.

With area-wide inflation back in negative territory — it fell to minus 0.2 percent in February for the first time in five months — and eurozone growth not expected to pick up any time soon, the case for further stimu-lus measures is clear, said Berenberg Bank economist Holger Schmieding.

“Amid heightened uncertainty about the world economy, rising political risks in Europe and renewed concerns about the health of the European banking system, finan-cial volatility will likely impair the transmission of the ECB’s current monetary stimulus to the real econ-omy for a while,” Schmieding said. “To bring the economy back to trend growth nonetheless, the ECB needs to do more.”

Capital Economics’ Loynes pre-dicted a cut in the key deposit rate from minus 0.30 percent to minus 0.5 percent and an increase in the monthly QE purchases from €60bn ($66bn) to €80bn. The deposit rate is the interest the ECB usually pays banks for the excess liquidity they park with it overnight.

But it has been negative since June 2014, meaning the ECB effectively charges the banks for using the facil-ity in the hope that they will instead lend it out to businesses and compa-nies to get the economy moving.

However, banks complain the currently ultra-low interest rate environment is eroding profits and pushing the deposit further into negative territory could harm them further still.

Commerzbank economist Michael Schubert suggested the ECB might therefore introduce a tiered interest rate scheme to ease the burden on banks, whereby lenders would pay a lower or no penalty rate at all up to a specified amount of excess liquidity.

“A tiered interest rate would probably send a clearer signal, as monetary policy does not only depend on the size of the rate cut,

but also on the scale of possible addi-tional action,” Schubert argued.

“If a tiered rate system were introduced, the burden on banks would rise less strongly and the deposit rate could be cut more sharply than if the ECB stuck to a universal penalty rate.”

But Berenberg Bank’s Schmied-ing said Draghi might have difficulty communicating such a move to the markets. “It could be technically diffi-cult to define the dividing line between ‘normal’ and ‘excess’ deposits,” he said. Furthermore, “communicating to mar-kets a decision that cuts one interest rate (on excess deposits) while rais-ing an interest rate at the same time (reduced penalty for ‘normal’ deposits) could tax even Draghi’s presentation skills quite severely,” Schmieding said.

A number of governing council members, notably Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann, are opposed to addi-tional stimulus measures. And the minutes from the December meet-ing, published in January, revealed that “some members” believed “that the existing policy measures were working in the right direction and more time should be given for them to unfold their full effect ... before adopting further monetary policy measures.”

Nevertheless, the ECB’s own staff economic projections, scheduled to be published on Thursday, are likely to provide the necessary ammunition to overcome such caution, analysts said. Loynes suggested the ECB could cut its forecast for growth this year to 1.5 percent from 1.7 percent previ-ously and the inflation forecast to 0.5 percent from 1.0 percent.

ECB set to increase doseof monetary medicine

Bloomberg

MUMBAI: India’s thriving gold markets have gone strangely quiet. Shops are shuttered across the world’s largest consumer after China and would-be customers are getting frustrated in a country that adores bullion.

“I will have to wait and see when the shops open next,” said Ghevar Jain, who stepped out in Mumbai this week to buy Rs200,000 ($2,970) worth of jewellery for weddings next month. Instead, he had to return empty-handed as stores in the Zaveri Bazaar weren’t trading. “I didn’t know about the strike.”

Jain had walked into a dispute that erupted last week between the nation’s thousands of jewellers and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Intent on boosting revenue as he reshapes Asia’s third-largest economy, Modi wants to impose a 1 percent excise duty on jewellery produced and sold within the country, and Finance Minister

Arun Jaitley announced the move in the budget on Monday. By Wednesday, members of the All India Gems & Jewellery Trade Federation, which represents jewellers nationwide, had started a three-day stoppage.

A similar shutdown in 2012, when jewellers closed for three weeks, was successful in get-ting the-then Manmohan Singh government to drop plans for an excise duty. A record current- account deficit and slump in the rupee to an all-time low in 2013 subsequently prompted the government to raise import taxes to 10 percent. In the run-up to this year’s budget, jewellers had been hopeful of cut in the import tax. Instead, Jaitley announced the excise duty.

“I don’t think the government will be in a hurry to roll back the excise tax as it will be blocking a source of revenue,” Harish Galipelli, head of com-modities and currencies at Inditrade Derivatives & Commodities Ltd, said from Hyderabad. “There is a new government this time around compared to 2012 and it is more keen in diverting funds into boosting economic activities.”

The shuttering of shops by jewellers last week is driving away Indian consumers at a time when offtake remains weak after a surge in prices. Spot gold in London has rallied 17 percent this year to $1,241.32 an ounce, outperforming other commod-ities on a resurgence in haven demand.

Bachhraj Bamalwa, a director at the All India Gems & Jewellery Trade Federation, said the group is now urging the administration to increase the import tax further, rather than go ahead with the introduction of the excise duty. India buys almost of the bullion it consumes from abroad.

“If the government’s intention is to collect rev-enue from the industry, we are asking them to increase the import tax instead of an excise duty and imposing one more compliance department on us,” Bamalwa said by phone from Kolkata. While the import tax is stoking smuggling, it would be less cumbersome than the excise tax on the operations of local manufacturers, he said.

The India Bullion and Jewellers Associa-tion Ltd, a second industry group, says it too would prefer an increase in the import tax rather

than an excise duty, arguing that would generate more revenue for the government while at the same time protecting manufacturers. A new 1 percent excise tax would bring in Rs16.5bn, while an equivalent rise in the import duty would earn Rs21.25bn, the group said.

The planned excise duty will make pur-chases more expensive for buyers and lead to irregular business practices, according to P R Somasundaram, managing director for India at the World Gold Council. The planned duty will put a significant compliance burden on the industry, which has already been weighed down by the import tax and a value-added tax, he said. India’s net imports of bullion were 897.5 tonnes in 2015 and consumption was 848.9 tonnes.

While the two trade groups will be approach-ing the Finance Minister Jaitley over the next few days to appeal for the removal of the excise duty, they’ve both said that the shutdown could be extended if they don’t get what they want. Jain, the disappointed shopper, may have some time to wait before he too can get what he wants.

Bloomberg

BEIJING: China’s plan to stream-line rules for initial public offerings is unlikely to be implemented this year, which was why Premier Li Keqiang didn’t mention the revamp in his annual work report delivered Saturday, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Lawmakers in December granted the China Securities Regulatory Commission a two-year window in which to install a registration-based system for IPOs, which would end CSRC intervention in pricing and allow companies to go public quicker.

Officials drafting Li’s address for the annual full-session of the National People’s Congress decided not to mention the system because they judged it unlikely to be realised in 2016, said the per-son, who asked not to be identified as the discussions were private.

Li had explicitly mentioned the registration system in both his 2014 and 2015 work reports. In this year’s address, he only pledged to “move forward with the reform of stock and bond markets and increase the level of rule of law in their development.” He also called for speeding regulatory improve-ments to cover all financial risks.

The year since Li mentioned the registration system in his 2015 work report has been a tumultu-ous one for China’s stock market. A rout last summer wiped out $5 tril-lion of market value, followed by the January removal of trading cir-cuit breakers less than a week after their introduction and capped off last month by Liu Shiyu replacing Xiao Gang as head of the stocks reg-ulator. Authorities are also studying a merger of stock market, banking and insurance regulators into one agency, people familiar with the plans said last week.

While pushing back timing for the revamp is bad news for the more than 700 companies that have IPO appli-cations pending with the CSRC, it does offer some respite to Chinese stock investors. Under the existing system, new listings are often priced cheaply due to the regulator’s controls, mean-ing IPOs are well supported when they start trading, and offer safe havens from the bear market in equities.

Calls to the CSRC seeking com-ment during the weekend went unanswered. In a February 26 statement, CSRC spokesman Deng Ge acknowledged that the various studies involved with changing the IPO process would require a “rel-atively long time,” adding that the realignment is the “direction of China’s capital market reform”.

India’s thriving gold markets up in arms over excise duty

China’s plan to

streamline IPO

rules unlikely

this year

BUSINESS VIEWS 27MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Brazil’s clean-energy boom is running out of steamBy Vanessa Dezem

Bloomberg

BRAZIL’S renewable energy industry is poised for a setback this year as the slumping economy dries up credit, curbs power demand and threatens

new transmission lines needed to connect projects to the grid.

Following years of growth that made Brazil the world’s 10th biggest wind market, the industry is revising down the amount of new capacity expected in 2016, along with the number of new wind projects expected to win contracts at government auctions.

President Dilma Rousseff is facing issues including the Zika virus, an inflation rate that’s climbed to 10.8 percent and a local cur-rency that’s down more 35 percent in the past year. Clean energy has been one of the few positive stories in Brazil, and the government has set ambitious growth targets to drive up generating capacity without boosting fos-sil-fuel pollution. Those goals may now be harder to reach, said Marcelo Girao, head of

energy project finance at Itau BBA.“There are clouds in renewable energy’s

path now,” Girao said in an interview. “The sector is high on the list of the Brazilian gov-ernment’s priorities and it has some progress to show, yet things aren’t looking so rosy now.”

Government contracts for clean energy probably won’t reach 2 gigawatts this year, according to Helena Chung, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance in Sao Paulo. That would show growth stabilizing over the past two years, and would be less than half the 4.6 gigawatts of new wind contracts in 2013.

New Energy Finance revised its wind-power forecast in February. About 3 gigawatts of capacity from projects already under development will be connected to the grid this year, 1 gigawatt less than the earlier estimate.

Wind power has boomed in Brazil, reach-ing 9 gigawatts of installed capacity last year, the most in Latin America and 10th world-wide. Total capacity in 2013 was a third of that, according to Abeeolica, the country’s wind-power trade group.

The government is helping drive that growth, and set a goal last year of getting 23 percent of Brazil’s energy from renewable

sources by 2030 as part its effort to fight cli-mate change. Power from solar, wind and biomass accounted for 9 percent of Brazil’s total generation in 2014. Brazil also pledgedin June to reduce carbon emissions by 37 per-cent by 2025 compared with 2005.

“I am concerned,” said Chung from BNEF. “Brazil’s government has denied giving more incentives for renewable energy in the same way it has been denying it for other indus-tries. That has a lot to do with the economic crisis, and a slowdown in the energy sector can give a bad signal to the market.”

Financing also will be a challenge after Moody’s Investors Service cut Brazil’s credit rating two levels last week, stripping the nation of its last investment-grade rating. Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings had already cut their ratings to junk levels as plunging prices for commodity exports and a historic corruption scandal drive the economy to its deepest con-traction in more than a century.

Brazil’s government Energy Research Agency, known as EPE, is planning three power auctions for this year. It held seven in 2015, when Brazil faced a record drought that dried up the nation’s most important

reservoirs and cut hydroelectric generation.“The problem now is declining demand

for power as the economy contracts,” said Mauricio Tolmasquim, the head of EPE, said by phone from Rio de Janeiro. “Distributors that buy energy in many auctions already have the capacity they need. In the next cou-ple of auctions we will certainly see a low demand for power.”

“It’s hard to quantify the magnitude of Brazil’s economic slow-down, and that gen-erates an uncertain environment,” Lucas Araripe, new-business director for the devel-oper Casa dos Ventos Energias Renovaveis SA, said in a phone interview. “

Another challenge is new transmission, which is needed to connect clean power projects to the grid. About 220 power-line projects were behind schedule as of Decem-ber, about 60 percent of the total capacity under development, according to a docu-ment from Brazil’s energy regulator Aneel. Difficulties getting environmental licenses caused the most delays, according to the document. “There is no way to grow power generation without transmission lines on time,” Girao said.

By Alex Longley

Bloomberg

FOR an industry that is losing money on almost every transaction, the world’s commodity shippers are remark-

ably busy grabbing any cargo they can get their hands on. From space, where satellites track ship movements, it all appears like the market is booming, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

At giant iron-ore loading ter-minals in Brazil and Australia, millions of tonnes are loaded each month on vessels that come and go like clockwork. Along the coastlines of China, Singapore and even Greece, the picture is the same: Little waiting about.

But all that movement is a consequence of weakness, not strength. Commodity prices and demand are so lousy, freight rates for the biggest ships don’t even cover a third of the cost of their crew. While owners would nor-mally idle ships when things slow down, hoping to spark a rebound in rates, the outlook this time around is so dire that many figure it’s better to have some business. Otherwise, they risk losing market share and earning nothing.

“It’s a bizarre scenario,” said Simon Francis, the founder of G-Ports Ltd, a Penryn, England based company that’s been mon-itoring shipping congestion for a decade. “There don’t seem to be that many waiting around for cargo” even though the industry is “on its knees,” he said.

For the first time since the early 1990s, combined trade in coal and iron ore is poised for two straight years of contraction, predicts Clarkson Research, part of the world’s biggest shipbroker. Almost every type of commodity carrier will fail to make a profit this year, and they’ll earn almost nothing in 2017, according to analysts’ forecasts and industry breakeven figures compiled by Bloomberg.

The current crisis stems from a shipbuilding boom that doubled the fleet’s capacity in the seven years through December, which included a bull market in com-modity prices as global demand surged. Owners increased new-vessel orders when rates rose to a record from 2007 to 2009, wagering that China’s near dou-ble-digit economic growth at that time would persist. It was a bad bet. Instead, the world’s second-largest economy is expanding at the weakest pace in 25 years.

As ship owners wrestle with oversupply, they are scuttling older vessels at an unprece-dented pace. A record 88 capesize

bulkers were broken up last year, and 14 had already been scrapped at the end of January this year, according to GMS, which buys ships destined for demolition. It may not be enough. Wrecking yards would have to scuttle more than three times the number of ships scrapped last year to sta-bilize freight rates, according to Herman Hildan, a shipping-equity analyst at Clarksons Platou Secu-rities in Oslo.

Owners saddled with more ships than they need are faced with a choice: leave vessels wait-ing at major ports in the hope that rates pick up, or carry on shipping unprofitably. For now, many are choosing the latter. While some ships are sitting idle, most are on the move.

Average waiting near Port Hedland in Australia was four days for 80 Capesize ships pre-paring to load iron ore, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Off Brazil, it was five days for 36 vessels. Of vessels monitored near China, the average was two days.

“Delays haven’t really done a lot for months,” said Francis, the founder of G-Ports.

There are multiple ways owners can idle carriers. They can either reject cargoes for sev-eral days in anticipation of better rates, or they mothball vessels for months or years, a process the industry calls layup. The longer the inactivity, the more difficult it is to reactivate the ship. There are few signs that owners are turning away business or waiting out the slump, according to Herman Bil-lung, the chief executive officer of Oslo-based Golden Ocean Group Ltd., which has a fleet of 70 vessels.

That is in part because laying up a ship — removing some of its crew and anchoring it — is a long and sometimes costly process, Billung said. Owners will often borrow ships from one another, either because they are betting on a rates rally or because they have cargoes they need to cover. When rates fall, such companies need the ships to earn whatever they can to repay the companies who lent the vessels. There are also loans and other financing expenses to consider.

To reverse the rout, the indus-try would need to hold back ships as rates tumble to record lows. The average time-charter return for a Capesize vessel dipped below $1,000 a day for the first time ever on February 26, down from a record high of $223,000 in 2008. The future isn’t looking much better.

“There doesn’t even seem to be light at the end of the tunnel,” an official said, adding that the industry’s biggest vessels may not break even again until 2018.

Ship owners scuttling older vessels at an unprecedented pace

Focus on ECB rate meeting and Chinese data this week

By Balazs Koranyi

Reuters

THE European Central Bank is almost certain to ease policy next week as depressed commodity prices raise the risk of deflation, while a string of data from China will offer clues about the extent

of the recent emerging market slowdown.Growth in most key economies has

slowed this year as states such as China to Brazil attempt to rebalance, weighing on glo-bal demand and sending deflationary waves around the world through sharply lower oil and metals prices.

Already struggling with ultra low infla-tion after years of crisis, the ECB has all but promised policy easing on Thursday but the devil will lie in the details.

A small 10 basis point cut to push its deposit rate deeper into negative territory is a foregone conclusion while some type of adjustment of the bank’s €1.5 trillion asset purchase programme is also near certain.

But each option on the table comes with side effects and limited functionality as monetary policy is deep in unconventional territory, making exotic decisions less likely given the difficulty of aligning the interest of 19 countries and 25 policymakers.

“Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP) seems to be all the rage in central bank cir-cles these days,” Morgan Stanley said in a

note to clients, argu-ing that such policies do not actually help bank lending. “There are concerns amongst investors that the neg-ative deposit rate will undermine the effec-tiveness of the ECB’s quantitative easing,” Morgan Stanley added.

“This is because it effectively introduces a tax on excess bank

reserves, i.e., effectively a tax on QE itself.”A small majority of analysts also expect a

€10bn increase in monthly asset purchases while others predict an expansion of QE into new asset classes or a fresh push for targeted long term refinancing operations. The ECB could also remove its self-imposed limits not to buy bonds yielding less than the deposit rate, a contentious move as it would mean certain losses on some assets, while a range of technical changes are possible.

The outlook for the United States was brighter, with Friday’s non-farm payrolls figures easing fears that the world’s largest economy was heading into recession and potentially allowing the Federal Reserve to gradually raise interest rates this year.

However, China’s faltering outlook will remain a top concern for policymakers around the globe and investor focus will be fixed on the annual meeting of China’s parliament, which must try to engineer a huge economic shift towards services and consumption and away from basic manufacturing.

As around 3,000 delegates from the National People’s Congress meet in Beijing, a wide range of fresh data, including on reserves and trade, are expected to point to a further loss of momentum and capital flight, supporting expectations for more measures to prop up sagging growth. “Government policy is being set to guide China along a narrow path: enough pain to force through reform and restructuring, close overcapac-ity, improve efficiency of investment, etc., but not enough to seriously damage job crea-tion,” Commonwealth Bank said.

Foreign trade data are expected to make for sombre reading, reflecting persistent weakness in demand at home and abroad which is holding back industrial production and keeping a lid on commodity prices.

Imports are seen down 10 percent in Feb-ruary, a improvement from a January’s 19 percent drop, while exports are seen declin-ing by 12.5 percent following an 11.2 percent drop in January. New lending is also seen lower after a surge a month earlier but money supply growth is seen steady, a figure closely analysed

Brazil’s renewable energy industry is poised for a setback this year as the slumping economy dries up credit, curbs power demand and threatens new transmission lines needed to connect projects to the grid.

The outlook for the United States was brighter, with Friday’s non-farm payrolls figures easing fears that the world’s largest economy was heading into recession.

Already struggling with ultra low inflation after years of crisis, the ECB has all but promised policy easing on Thursday but the devil will lie in the details.

by markets to gauge if China can arrest the slowdown in investments.

February foreign reserves data will also be closely watched, with most expect-ing a slowdown in the exit of funds after exceptionally high outflows in January.

“Capital is flowing out of China at an unprecedented pace,” Nordea analysts Amy Y. Zhuang said. “$850bn is estimated to have left the country since mid-2014.”

“Even huge FX reserves like China’s would seem insufficient if the pace of depletion continues,” Zhuang added.

The Bank of Canada also meets next week and will likely keep rates on hold, taking comfort in stabilizing global markets, a slightly better-than-forecast fourth-quarter GDP reading and a mod-est rebound in commodity prices. British industry data are also expected to gen-erate interest after output fell 1.1 percent in December, its sharpest monthly drop since 2012. January figures are expected to show a 0.6 percent increase, taking the annualised growth to 0.2 percent.

The new headquarters (right) of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany.

BUSINESS28 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Why is eurozone inflation so persistently low?AFP

FRANKFURT: Despite a raft of different measures by the Euro-pean Central Bank to kickstart sluggish consumer prices in the eurozone, inflation in the single currency bloc turned negative in February for the first time in five months. The ECB estimates that consumer prices need to rise at an annual rate of close to but just below 2.0 percent to foster healthy economic growth. But area-wide inflation stood at minus 0.2 percent in Febru-ary, due to the combination of a number of different factors, experts say.

OIL: “The low level of infla-tion and the drop in February are largely attributable to energy price developments,” Oxford Economics economist Ben May said. Oil prices have been falling sharply for the past two years, weighed down by over-abun-dant global supply.

For households and busi-nesses, this may be positive, as it cuts energy bills, reduces heating costs and expenditure on petrol. But given the heavy weighting of energy prices in the overall basket of goods that are used to calculate consumer prices, they are keeping a lid on the headline rate of infla-tion, May said.

The oil market, which hit its lowest level since 2003 at the beginning of this year before ten-tatively picking up at the start of February, has seen strong fluc-tuations in recent weeks amid speculation supplier countries may throttle production.

Nevertheless, a substantial and sustained rebound in oil prices does not seem to be on the horizon for now. As a result, inflation forecasts for the euro area look set to be downgraded again, said Bundesbank presi-dent Jens Weidmann recently.

EXCHANGE RATE: After falling sharply in March 2015 in the wake of the ECB’s announce-ment of a massive asset purchase programme known as QE, the euro has risen against the dollar since and is currently hovering at around $1.10. “A rise in the euro exchange rate means that the price of imported goods falls,” said May. In other words, if the euro rises in value against other currencies, the price of an imported car or refrigerator is reduced, bringing down the overall inflation rate.

WAGES: Another factor weighing on inflation are wages. “A lot of the countries affected by the crisis, such as Spain, Portu-gal and Greece, have been forced to reform their labour markets and make them more flexible, which has led to lower wages,” said Natixis economist Johan-nes Gareis. That leads to lower household spending which, in turn, leads to lower inflation.

SLUGGISH INVESTMENT: Sluggish corporate investment is another factor. When com-panies invest, they create jobs, which can push up salaries, and consequently inflation. But “lots of companies are worried about the future,” said Charles Wyplosz, economics profes-sor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

AFP

THE STEEL plants and cement factories scattered across China’s Shandong province have made it one of the most contaminated

areas of the world’s biggest polluter. But for one company, that just makes the business climate better.

ASL Masks says it turned out more than 100,000 face coverings last year and aims to more than double that in 2016 as China struggles to shake off the toxic smog produced by its heavy industries.

At ASL’s Dongliu facility, shabby buildings bearing faded signs from the 1980s exhorting “scientific inno-vation” are just visible through the haze — pollution levels were six times international standards.

Dozens of middle-aged women wearing bright blue hats and aprons worked in near silence, sliding air fil-ters into holes in the plastic products before threading on straps and yel-low buckles.

“Smog is bad for the lungs. We all wear masks around here,” said pack-ager Chen Aimei. China is the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter and last year air quality in some 300 haze-hit Chinese cities failed to meet national standards.

Levels of PM2.5, tiny particles which can embed deep within the lungs, are usually above the World Health Organisation’s recommended maximum of 25 parts per million. In the northeastern city of Shenyang they reached more than 1,400 in November.

The pollution — mostly generated by burning coal to power industry and heat homes, along with road traffic — is responsible for hundreds of thou-sands of premature deaths in China each year, experts say. Public anger

Chinese toxic smog has silver lining for mask makers

NAME IN THE MARKET: COMMERCIAL BORROWING

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Capital Comment

It is certain that the US economy will be in recession in the next 12 months. It’s been seven years, eight years since we had the last recession in the US. Look at the debt, the debt is staggering.

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#US to top sovereign borrowing in 2016. #Japan, #China, #Italy & #France complete top 5

#Abha #Chamber sets up SAR 100 mln real estate firm

Global #steel produc-tion has sunk for first time in 25 years. #Coal and steel hub in north-east #China stuck in recession

Foster tech innovation by removing barri-ers to competition and investing more in edu-cation, R&D

The Ohio Police & Fire Pension

Fund said it would commit

less to private equity this year,

as stock market selloffs have

shrunk the amount of available

capital to put to work.

Thousands of small brokerages

are bracing for a tighter rule

governing investments they

recommend to retirement

savers, a change they say will

drive up compliance costs

and could force them to drop

middle-class clients.

Sawiris to acquire CI Capital Holding this monthBloomberg

CAIRO: Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris will complete the acquisition of CI Capital Holding this month to cre-ate Egypt’s second-biggest investment bank.

The 924m Egyptian-pound deal ($118m) is in “execution mode” after the share-purchase agreement was signed, Sawiris said in an interview in Cairo yesterday. He sees no regulatory objec-tions to the deal. Shares of Orascom Telecom Media & Technology, Sawiris’ invest-ment arm, advanced the most in six weeks.

The acquisition comes about four months after Orascom Telecom Media & Technology, majority owned by Sawiris, paid more than 600m pounds for Beltone Financial Holding SAE, another investment bank.

The billionaire is betting on an eventual recovery in the battered economy of the most

populous Arab country, even as a foreign currency shortage hampers growth. Combining Beltone and CI Capital would create a company that con-trols about 25 percent of brokerage business in Egypt, Sawiris said.

“There’s a major crisis in the economy,” Sawiris said. “If you believe that when things get really bad, that’s when they start to get better, it’s the right time to” invest, he said. “The end game is definitely to cre-ate the largest player in Egypt.”

The acquisition of CI Capital is “purely a mar-ket opportunity because the investment, brokerage and asset management scene in Egypt was divided into one big player and lots of small and medium-sized fraction players,” he added, refer-ring to investment bank EFG-Hermes.

The nation’s benchmark stock index has tumbled more than 35 percent over the past 12 months, the world’s worst performer after Ukraine’s gauge.

BACK TO BUSINESSsight

is mounting over the issue, but a wave of firms see silver linings to the smog, including air purifier and pollution monitor manufacturers, as well as mask makers.

Even when many Chinese fac-tory workers had downed tools for the Lunar New Year holiday in Feb-ruary, CEO Zhang Wenchao kept his staff on until the last possible moment. “December to April is our busiest period... because it’s the peak for pollution,” he said.

ASL started making industrial masks in the 1980s, but has since turned to the more lucrative anti-pollution equipment market.

Demand has grown as authorities have started releasing more data on the problem, and state media estimate the Chinese pollution mask market was worth nearly 4bn yuan ($600m)

in 2015. ASL has designed a product specially adapted for youngsters by measuring the faces of 100 children.

“People’s awareness of pollu-tion protection is increasing all the time. People know that PM 2.5 is bad for them,” Zhang said. Shandong, in eastern China, is the centre of the industry, with another produc-tion hub, Dadian, dubbed the “mask village” for producing the cheapest specimens.

It can be a murky business. Dadian was hit by scandal last year when local media reported second-hand fabric used to make the masks was piled up beside fresh manure, and slept in by stray dogs.

Customs officers in China’s com-mercial capital Shanghai said in December they had seized 120,000 fake respiratory masks, labelled as

being made by US manufacturer 3M Co. In other cases, hospital masks have been washed and resold as new, reports said. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang declared a “war on pol-lution” at the Communist-controlled National People’s Congress (NPC) par-liament two years ago.

But although average particu-late levels in Chinese cities fell 10.3 percent in 2015, according to official figures collated by Greenpeace, none met the WHO’s standards. On Friday, a day before Li opened this year’s NPC session, PM2.5 counts were well over 300 in the capital.

Beijing and other cities in China issued their first ever “red alerts” for pollution this winter, banning half of all private cars from roads and advis-ing some schools to close. The alerts struck fear into millions — and were a boon to companies selling protec-tion from the smog.

“In the red alert, suddenly all these people who never cared were like: ‘Oh my God!’” said Liam Bates, the founder of a company producing handheld pollution monitors, mainly for the Chinese market. “In 24 hours we sold pretty much what we sold the entire month before,” he added.

Zhang, 29, whose father bought ASL when it was an unprofita-ble state-owned enterprise in the 1990s, said he had amassed consid-erable wealth, but declined to go into detail. Behind a large mahogany desk, he brandished his latest invention — an air filter which covers only the nose — and insisted he hoped efforts to reduce pollution would be effective, even at the expense of sales.

“We are like doctors looking at patients,” he said. “No doctor wants his patient to be sick.” Still, Zhang does not expect demand to die. “Over the next decade, there will be efforts to improve the air quality,” he said. “But it won’t be completely improved”.

A worker checking a pollution mask at the ASL Masks factory in Dongliu, in China’s Shandong province.

Jang eases clear to claim victory in Singapore

PAGE | 33 PAGE | 34

Hiddink confident over Costa fitness

for PSG clash

MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016 • 27 Jumada I 1437

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@peninsulaqatar @peninsula_qatarthepeninsulaqatar

QSL: Al Rayyan to target more glory

The Peninsula

DOHA: After winning their eighth Qatar Stars League (QSL) football shield, Al Rayyan have no plans to rest on their laurels.

On Saturday, Al Rayyan ham-mered Al Wakrah 5-0 for their 20th win of the season in which they have lost just one game.

Sheikh Saud bin Khalid Al Thani, Chairman, Al Rayyan, said: “We hope to continue to winning. We are happy we have smashed so many records this season.”

He said: “This win is for the Al Rayyan fans. These fans have a long history with us. I hope we continue in this trend.”

Sheikh Saud said Al Rayyan had ‘achieved amazing results through-out the season’.

“The fact that we have won with five rounds to spare clearly shows we are the best side in Qatar. We are the undisputed champions,” Sheikh Saud said in Al Kass TV programme ‘Al Majlis’.

“The support of the fans has been incredible for the team as whole,”

Sheikh Saud said. “Their support encouraged the players no end. We managed to silence the doubters who thought Al Rayyan was finished’.

Al Rayyan were demoted to the second division at the end of the reg-ular QSL season in 2013-14.

A quick recovery in the second

division saw them promoted to the QSL at the end of the 2014-2015 sea-son. Since last year in September, there’s been no stopping Al Rayyan who have lost just one game the entire season.

Head of football at Al Rayyan, Ali Salem, said the title was ‘well

deserved’.“It has been a wonderful effort of the coaching side headed by Jorge Fossati, the backroom staff, the technical side of the club and last but not least - a great show by the play-ers,” Salem said in the same TV show.

“It has been an exceptional season for the players. I take this opportunity

to congratulate the Board of Directors headed by Sheikh Saud bin Khalid Al Thani,” Salem said.

“We can’t recall if a title race has been decided five rounds to spare,” Salem said. “This win is for the Al Rayyan fans,” he added.

“It (the win) is worthy of great

celebration. The fans clearly deserve credit for backing the players and the team as a whole,” Salem said.

Al Rayyan will now switch their attention to the two remaining com-petitions - the Qatar Cup and the Emir’s Cup to be played in April and through to May.

Al Rayyan players celebrate winning the Qatar Stars League title during a victory parade on Saturday night. RIGHT: Al Rayyan, winners of the Qatar Stars League and Qatar Basketball League, show off their trophies during a function at the club premises yesterday.

We are happy we have smashed so many records this season, says Sheikh Saud

H E Sheikh Joaan bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, President of Qatar Olympic Committee is seen during the prize distribution ceremony of the Annual Camel Racing Festival at Shahaniyah Racecourse. Sheikh Joaan honoured the winners of the main races on the seventh day of Annual Camel Racing Festival. H E Sheikh Joaan awarded H E Sheikh Hamad bin Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and H E Sheikh Jassim bin Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani the Golden Spear and the Golden Daggers. The races were held in the presence of Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and the Chairman of Race Organizing Committee H E Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Faisal Al Thani.

Sheikh Joaan at the camel race

Al Khor trounce Qatar SC

Action from the Qatar Stars League (QSL) match between Lekhwiya and Umm Salal at Lekhwiya Stadium yesterday.

The Peninsula

DOHA: Al Khor SC trounced Qatar SC 3-0 in the Round 21 match of the Qatar Stars League (QSL) while the two other matches ended in identi-cal one-all draw yesterday.

Lekhwiya drew 1-1 with Umm Salal.

In another match, El Jaish were held to a one-all draw by bottom sit-ters Mesaimeer.

Playing at home Qatar SC con-ceded three first half goals and managed to pull one back in the sec-ond half. Al Khor did not take time to settle down and found the net in the very sixth minute through Julio Cesar Donacimento. In the 20th minute, Al Khor struck again this time Madson Formagini Caridade finding the net to make it 2-0.

With four minutes to go for the first half whistle Marcos Antonio Miranda made it 3-0 to compound

Qatar SC miseries. In the second half, Kooky Yong scored for Qatar SC in the 70th minute to give a glimmer of hope which faded in the course of time.

However, Sebastiao Lazaroni could not add to the one goal they scored and ended by picking their 11th defeat of the QSL challenge.

Qatar SC are now second last in the points standings with 20 points in the 14 team league played on a dou-ble leg system.

SPORT30 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Mata off as United lose, Benteke saves Liverpool

Crystal Palace’s Mile Jedinak (left) in action against Liverpool’s Mamadou Sakho during their English Premier League soccer match against Liverpool FC in London, Britain yesterday. Liverpool won 2-1.

Messi double keeps Barca record rolling

Barcelona’s Lionel Messi celebrates after scoring a goal against Eibar in their Spanish La Liga match yesterday.

AFP

MADRID: A Lionel Messi-inspired Bar-celona tightened their grip on the La Liga title race with a comprehensive 4-0 win at Eibar yesterday to open up an 11-point lead at the top.

Munir El Haddadi tapped home the opener from Luis Suarez’s cross before Messi doubled Barca’s advantage with a brilliant individual effort just before half-time.

Messi doubled his tally from the penalty spot before Suarez lashed home the fourth six minutes from time.

Barca’s 11th consecutive league win also stretches their record unbeaten run to 36 games.

Real Madrid remain 12 points adrift of Barca in third despite Cristiano Ronaldo’s four-goal show in a 7-1 demolition of Celta Vigo on Saturday.

The European champions were with-out the suspended Neymar, who made the most of his free weekend to return to his native Brazil.

However, El Haddadi made the most of his rare chance to start with a simple fin-ish at the back post eight minutes in after Messi’s brilliant pass had played in Suarez behind the Eibar defence.

Suarez was surpassed by Ronaldo in the fight to be La Liga’s top scorer and the Uru-guayan look determined to hit back early on, but fluffed his lines with just Abel Riesgo to beat two minutes later.

El Haddadi should have teed up Suarez for a tap-in from another Messi through ball midway through the half, but the young-ster overhit his pass and the ball slipped just wide. Eibar then enjoyed a concerted period of pressure and were desperately unlucky not to level when Borja Baston’s cross hit Sergio Busquets and flew inches past the far post.

Yet, just when Eibar looked the most likely to score, Messi killed the game as a contest as he intercepted the ball in midfield and drove towards the Eibar goal before fir-ing into the far corner for his 20th league goal of the season.

The second-half was far shorter on goalmouth action, but there was time for Messi to put Barca’s recent troubles from the penalty spot behind him when Ivan Ramis blocked the Argentine’s cross with his hand.

Messi took responsibility after Suarez had missed from the spot against Rayo Val-lecano in midweek and coolly dispatched the penalty for his 35th goal of the season.

Suarez got the goal he craved to move back to within one of Ronaldo in the scor-ing charts with a brilliant nutmeg of Capa before smashing the ball into the far corner.

AFP

LONDON: Juan Mata was sent off as Manchester United’s hopes of Champions League qualification were dealt a seri-ous setback in a 1-0 defeat at West Bromwich Albion yes-terday.

The Spaniard received two quick-fire bookings mid-way through the first half, for block-ing a free-kick and then taking a swipe at Darren Fletcher, and West Brom made their numeri-cal advantage count in the 66th minute when Salomon Rondon netted his fourth goal in six Premier League games.

It ended United’s recent revival of four straight wins and left Louis van Gaal’s side in sixth place, three points below the Champions League berths having played a game more than fourth-place Man-chester City.

United are now in danger of being caught by forthcom-ing Europa League opponents Liverpool, who are three points behind them with a game in

hand following a last-gasp 2-1 win at Crystal Palace.

Mata was shown his first yellow card in the 24th minute at The Hawthorns for block-ing Fletcher’s free-kick and saw red two minutes later for clumsily swinging his foot at the former United midfielder.

Craig Dawson almost put West Brom in front immedi-ately, only for his ambitious 25-yard lob to fall inches wide of the left-hand post.

Having survived until half-time, United started the second half strongly and threatened through young forwards Mar-cus Rashford and Jesse Lingard.

But West Prom claimed the points when Venezuelan striker Rondon gathered Sebastien Pocognoli’s drilled left-wing cross before slamming home left-footed to lift Tony Pulis’s men 15 points clear of the bot-tom three, effectively securing their survival.

Earlier, substitute Chris-tian Benteke won and scored a 96th-minute penalty as 10-man Liverpool came from behind to win 2-1 at Palace.

Joe Ledley’s 48th-minute strike and Liverpool midfielder James Milner’s second-half dismissal for two bookable offences looked to have set Pal-ace on course for a first win in 12 league matches.

But a slip by Palace goal-keeper Alex McCarthy gifted Roberto Firmino a 72nd-minute equaliser, before Damien Delaney’s rash chal-lenge on Benteke enabled the Belgium striker to net the win-ner from the spot.

“You can try (to make changes), but the rest is pas-sion,” Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp told Sky Sports at Selhurst Park.

“Football is like this. You make a plan at the end, but the lads did great. This is the third league win in a row. I can’t believe how it feels -- really good, a big moment for us.”

Liverpool climbed two places to seventh after record-ing a third successive league win for the first time in a year.

Palace manager Alan Pardew, whose side have now gone 12 games without a league

win, criticised referee Andre Marriner’s decision to award Benteke a penalty.

Delaney pulled out of a sliding challenge on Benteke inside the box, but the Irishman had already gone to ground and replays showed that his right knee had clipped the Belgian’s left foot.

“(Benteke) is looking for it. Our player is pulling out of it,” said Pardew, whose side are nine points above the relega-tion zone.

“If the linesman gives it for the touch of the knee in the last minute, I think it is harsh.”

Rondon nets his fourth goal in six games while Liverpool record third straight Premier League victory

Salomon Rondon scores the first goal for West Brom against Manchester United in their Barclays Premier League match played yesterday.

Marseille held by Toulouse,

Rennes thrash NantesAFP

PARIS: Marseille’s hopes of qualify-ing for Europe look all but over after they were held to an entertaining 1-1 draw by struggling Toulouse at the Velodrome yesterday, while Rennes thrashed Nantes 4-1.

Marseille missed a host of good chances, and Wissam Ben Yedder ran clear to slot Toulouse ahead in the 55th minute.

Relegation-threatened Toulouse were supposed to be playing their first game under new coach Pascal Dupraz, but he was absent after suf-fering a heart scare at training on Saturday and spending the night in hospital under observation.

And the away defence imploded, as they have done all season, as Somalia put through his own net with 16 minutes to play.

Coach Michel has come under increased pressure in recent weeks, but Marseille would have expected to end a club record 11-match streak without a home win in the league against relegation-threatened

Toulouse. But instead they were held and stay seven points off the top three, and with Lyon playing later on Sunday that gap could quickly become eight.

Toulouse remain second-from-bottom in the table and nine points from safety.

Meanwhile, Rennes ended Nantes’ 13-match unbeaten run in the league in emphatic style, as young striker Ousmane Dem-bele scored a hat-trick at Roazhon Park.

The 18-year-old opened the scoring within the first minute as he reacted quickest after a set-piece was not fully cleared.

Supersub Kamil Grosicki was given a rare start by Rolland Courbis and the Pole doubled the lead inside the first quarter of an hour, before Dembele’s free-kick evaded every-one in the middle to put the result beyond doubt.

Dembele completed his tre-ble before half-time, and although Adryan’s strike and a second yellow card for Giovanni Sio gave Nantes a glimmer of hope, Rennes held on with ease.

Pakistan’s Ahmad clinches U19 title as Qatar Ouda finishes runner-up in U13

The Peninsula

DOHA: Top seed Israr Ahmad of Pakistan won the U19 title at the Qatar Junior Open squash championship while Qatar’s Mohamed Tarek Ouda went down fighting in the U13 final of the Asian Squash Federation (ASF) Junior Super Series Silver event.

Yesterday, at the Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex, Ahmad overcame Sajad Zareian Jahromi of Iran in an exciting five-game thriller which lasted for one hour.

In the fortune fluctuating tussle for supremacy, Ahmad lost the first game but bounced back to take the next two games but a lost the fourth game.

The 18-year-old Lahore born, who is ranked 162 on the PSA world ranking, managed to

keep his cool to take the fifth to wrap up the title 9-11, 11-1, 12-10, 8-11, 11-6.

Abhay Singh of India fin-ished third while Lai Cheuk Nam Matthew of Hong Kong came fourth.

Meanwhile, Asad Ullah Khan of Pakistan defeated Ouda of Qatar 11-7, 11-8, 11-2 to win the U13 title.

Yousef Essam Farag of Qatar finished third and Abdulelah Ibrahim Aboreggah of Saudi Arabia took the fourth spot.

In the U17, Alireza Shameli of Iran defeated Chan Chi Ho of Hong Kong 11-9, 9-11, 11-2, 11-9 to clinch the title.

In the U13, Qatar’s Salem Yousef Al Malki finished behind first place winner Muhammad Huzaifa Ibrahim of Pakistan and runner-up Arnav Tevatia of India. Arvin Rasulzadeh of Iran finished fourth.

QATAR JUNIOR OPEN RESULTSBoys U19

Israr Ahmad [1] Pakistan

Sajad Zareian Jahromi [2] Iran

Abhay Singh [3] India

Lai Cheuk Nam Matthew [4] Hong Kong

Boys U17Alireza Shameli [1] Iran

Chan Chi Ho [4] Hong Kong

Zeeshan Ullah Gul Pakistan

Lam Yat Ting Harley [2] Hong KOng

Boys U13Asad Ullah Khan [7] Pakistan

Mohamed Tarek Ouda [4] Qatar

Yousef Essam Farag [5] Qatar

Abdulelah Ibrahim Aboreggah Saudi Arabia

Boys U11Muhammad Huzaifa Ibrahim [1] Pakistan

Arnav Tevatia [2] India

Salem Yousef Al Malki [4] Qatar

Arvin Rasulzadeh [3] Iran

Action from the Qatar Junior Open squash championship at the Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex in Doha yesterday.

SPORT 31MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Patience pays as Svitolina wins Malaysia OpenAFP

KUALA LUMPUR: Elina Svitolina shrugged off a dropped first set and lengthy rain delays to defeat Euge-nie Bouchard for the Malaysian Open title yesterday.

The win is the fourth WTA title for the Ukrainian world number 19, who won 6-7(5) 6-4, 7-5 over Bou-chard, of Canada.

The third set was hit by intermit-tent suspensions of more than two hours due to Kuala Lumpur’s trop-ical rains.

Down early in the set, the sixth-seeded Bouchard managed to claw back into a tie at 5-5, but once play resumed for good the second seed Svitolina put the contest away.

It was Svitolina’s third victory in

as many meetings with Bouchard and her first since winning the WTA Marrakech in May of last year.

Bouchard, however, took another step toward regaining her form after a rough season last year.

She rose to as high as world number five in late 2014, with a series of solid Grand Slam show-ings under her belt.

But her form dropped off in 2015, and she slipped in the locker room at the US Open in September, suf-fering a concussion. Forced to pull out of the tournament, she missed three months of play, but has shown signs lately of getting back on track.

The doubles competition was won by the Varatchaya Wongtean-chai of Thailand and Yang Zhaoxuan of China, who beat the Chinese duo of Liang Chen and Wang Yafan, 4-6, 6-4, 10-7.

Korea beat New Zealand in Davis Cup tie in Seoul

Tomic lashes at team-mate

Kyrgios commitment

AFP

SEOUL: Chung Hyeon achieved a clean sweep against Jose Statham yesterday to help South Korea secure a first-round victory over New Zea-land in their Davis Cup tie.

Chung, who had defeated Michael Venus 6-4, 7-5, 6-1 on Friday, beat Statham 6-2, 6-4, 6-2 in less than two

hours, helping South Korea earn their ticket for the second round against India.

New Zealand managed just one vicoty over the South Koreans, in the final day’s doubles match. Artem Sitak and Michael Venus beat Lee Duck-Hee and Lim Yong-Kyu 7-6 (7-3), 6-4, 4-6, 6-4.

On Friday Hong Seong-Chan also beat Statham 6-4, 6-3, 4-6, 7-6(6).

AFP

MELBOURNE: Australia’s two lead-ing stars Bernard Tomic and Nick Kyrgios are at odds forcing new captain Lleyton Hewitt into a peace-making role after an extraordinary post-script to Australia’s Davis Cup loss to the United States yesterday.

Tomic challenged the commit-ment of Kyrgios to the Davis Cup competition after his team-mate’s withdrawal from the Kooyong tie with illness and back trouble.

John Isner was too strong for Tomic winning 6-4, 6-4, 5-7, 7-6 (7/4) to deliver the Americans the tie 3-1 and reach the competition’s quar-ter-finals. Yet there was controversy during the match when Tomic was overheard during a changeover ques-tioning Kyrgios’s absence from the tie.

While in conversation with team captain Hewitt, television micro-phones caught Tomic muttering: “Nick’s sitting down in Canberra. Bullshit he’s sick.”

Tomic was also heard saying “that’s twice he’s done it”, in possi-ble reference to Kyrgios’s withdrawal from the tie against the Czech Repub-lic last year.

Tomic later did not resile from his comments and questioned the legitimacy of the virus that ruled

out Kyrgios if he was competing as planned in an American tournament this week. Tomic said he spoke to his teammate after his loss and Kyrgios told him he was planning to play in Indian Wells, California, this week.

- ‘In the heat of the moment’ -Australia’s top-ranked player recalled that a similar situation occurred a year ago when Kyrgios withdrew from the Davis Cup against the Czech Republic.

“He didn’t come to Czech and had stress fractures and somehow played Indian Wells and felt good,” Tomic said at the post-match press conference.

“Now it’s going to be funny for me to see whether he plays.

“If he plays Indian Wells, then he’s definitely lost a little bit of my respect.”

Tomic said it was disappointing not to have Kyrgios playing in this weekend’s David Cup tie.

“He’s an amazing player and it would have been important to have him here.”

Hewitt, who came out of retire-ment for Saturday’s five-set doubles loss to the crack Bryan brothers in Kyrgios’s absence, said he did not share Tomic’s sentiments.

The captain said they were “in the heat of the moment, and frustra-tion”, but Tomic continued to question Kyrgios at the media conference.

Elina Svitolina of Ukraine poses with her trophy after winning the BMW Malaysian Open women’s tennis tournament in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

BANGLADESHTamim Iqbal lbw Bumrah 13

Soumya Sarkar c Pandya b Nehra 14

Sabbir Rahman (not out) 32

S Al Hasan c Bumrah b Ashwin 21

Mushfiqur Rahim (run out) 4

Mashrafe Mortaza c Kohli b Jadeja 0

Mahmudullah Riyad (not out) 33

Extras (W-3) 3

Total (for 5 wkts in 15 overs) 120Fall of wickets: 1-27, 2-30, 3-64, 4-75,

5-75.

Bowling: Ashwin 3-0-14-1 (w1); Nehra

3-0-33-1 (w1); Bumrah 3-0-13-1; Jadeja

3-0-25-0; Pandya 3-0-35-0 (w1).

INDIAR Sharma c Soumya b Al-Amin 1

S Dhawan c Soumya b Taskin 60

V Kohli (not out) 41

M S Dhoni (not out) 20

Total (for 2 wkts in 13.5 overs) 122Fall of wickets: 1-5, 2-99.

Bowling: Taskin 3-0-14-1; Al-Amin 2.5-

0-30-1; Hider 1-0-14-0; Shakib 2-0-26-0;

Mashrafe 2-0-16-0; Nasir 3-0-22-0.

SCOREBOARD

SOUTH AFRICAA de Villiers b Hastings 13

Q de Kock b Faulkner 44

F du Plessis c Maxwell b Hastings 79

J Duminy c Smith b Marsh 14

D Miller c Maxwell b Agar 33

F Behardien c Agar b Faulkner 3

C Morris c Warner b Faulkner 3

D Wiese (not out) 10

K Rabada (not out) 0

Extras (LB-1, NB-1, W-3) 5

Total (for 7 wkts in 20 overs) 204Fall of wickets: 1-15, 2-77, 3-103, 4-142,

5-151, 6-165, 7-198.

Bowling: Hazlewood 4-0-50-0 (2w); Hastings

4-0-42-2; Marsh 2-0-28-1 (1nb); Maxwell 4-0-

30-0; Faulkner 4-0-28-3 (1w); Agar 2-0-25-1.

Did not bat: D Steyn, Imran Tahir.

AUSTRALIAA Finch b Rabada 2

S Watson c Duminy b Steyn 9

S Smith c Rabada b Steyn 19

D Warner b Rabada 77

G Maxwell c De Villiers b Morris 75

M Marsh (not out) 2

J Faulkner (not out) 7

Extras (LB-4, NB-2, W-8) 14

Total (for 5 wkts in 20 overs) 205Fall of wickets: 1-2, 2-28, 3-32, 4-193, 5-194.

Bowling: Rabada 4-0-25-2 (3w); Morris 4-0-

39-1 (1nb, 3w); Steyn 4-0-32-2 (1nb); Wiese

4-0-58-0 (1w); Imran Tahir 4-0-47-0 (1w).

Result: Australia won by five wickets.

Series: The three-match series is tied at 1-1.

SCOREBOARD

Reuters

JOHANNESBURG: A record stand from David Warner and Glenn Maxwell helped Australia secure a last-ball, five-wicket victory over South Africa in the second Twenty20 International at The Wanderers yes-terday.

South Africa posted 204 for seven on a flat batting wicket and were on top when they reduced the tourists to 32-3 in their reply.

Yet Warner (77 from 40 balls) and Maxwell (75 from 43) staged a remarkable fightback with a Twenty20 Australian record part-nership for any wicket of 161 to take their side close to victory.

Needing two from the final delivery of the innings from seamer Kagiso Rabada, Australia’s Mitch-ell Marsh bludgeoned the ball down the ground and was able to scram-ble the runs his side needed to level

the three-game series at 1-1.Warner and Maxwell’s stand

fell just short of the world record of 171 set by New Zealand’s Kane Wil-liamson and Martin Guptill against Pakistan in January.

The pair were particularly severe on leg-spinner Imran Tahir and seamer David Wiese, who went for 105 in their combined eight overs.

The only consolation for South Africa was the successful return of fast bowler Dale Steyn (2-32 from four overs), who is trying to prove his fitness ahead of the World Twenty20 in India, which starts tomorrow.

The home side’s innings was anchored by Faf du Plessis, who smashed 79 from 41 balls, with fine cameos from Quinton de Kock (44) and David Miller (33).

James Faulkner proved the pick of the Australian bowlers with 3-28 from his four overs.

The final match of the three-game series will be played in Cape Town on Wednesday.

Warner, Maxwell set record in Australia win

Australia’s James Faulkner celebrates after scoring the winning run against South Africa in their second T20 match played at the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa yesterday.

India clinch Asia Cup India clinch Asia Cup

IANS

MIRPUR: Shikhar Dhawan and Virat Kohli led the charge as India won the Asia Cup, outclassing Bangladesh by eight wickets in the final at the Sher-e-Bangladesh National Stadium here last evening.

Coming together after India had got off to a poor start, Dhawan and Kohli produced a 94-run partnership as the visitors overhauled the 121-run target in 13.5 overs.

Dhawan, who has been a flop throughout the tournament, finally found his touch when it mattered most, scoring 60 runs off 44 balls with nine boundaries and a six.

Kohli remained unbeaten on 41 runs off 28 balls with five boundaries. India skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni added the finishing touch with 20 runs off just six deliveries, with one hit to the ropes and two sixes.

Pacer Al-Amin Hossain (1/30) gave Bangladesh some early hope by dismissing Rohit Sharma early. Chasing a tricky target in front of a packed stadium rooting for the hosts, Rohit probably found the pressure too much to handle as he edged one that was moving slightly away to Soumya Sarkar at first slip.

But that was one of the few moments of joy that the Bangla-desh players and the capacity home crowd could find as Kohli and Dha-wan came together to pull the visitors out of trouble.

The Delhi duo kept the required run rate within manageable lim-its with regular hits to the fence and some excellent running between the wickets.

It needed a superb effort in the field by Sarkar off Taskin Ahmed’s (1/14)bowling to see the back of Dha-wan. The Delhi batsman attempted a square drive off a full toss, but Sarkar dived to his right to pluck the ball

inches off the ground.But by then, India were well on the

road to victory and Dhoni strode in to finish off the job with some trademark power-packed hits.

Earlier, Mohammad Mahmudullah produced some lower order fireworks as Bangladesh posted 125/5 in 15 overs.

Walking in with Bangladesh in trouble at 75/5, the right-hander pro-ceeded to hit two boundaries and an equal number of sixes in his 13-ball innings to remain unbeaten on 33.

Sabbir Rahman gave him crucial support from the other end with 32 runs from 29 balls. The duo produced a 45-run partnership to help the hosts to a competitive total.

Indian pacers Jasprit Bumrah (1/13) and Ashish Nehra (1/33) made good use of the seam friendly con-ditions to remove the Bangladesh openers early on.

Off-spinner Ravichandran Ash-win, who opened the Indian bowling, had figures of 1/14 while left-arm spinner Ravindra Jadeja (1/25) also bagged a wicket.

Bangladesh had a decent start with 11 runs in the first two overs before Bumrah pegged back the run rate with just three runs in the third over.

Dhawan and Kohli lead the charge as hosts suffer eight-wicket loss in rain-hit 15 overs per side final

SPORT32 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Pellegrini sets City 75-point target to clinch League title

AFP

MANCHESTER: Manuel Pellegrini believes 75 points will be enough to win the Premier League after declar-ing that his Manchester City side are still firmly in the title race.

City ended a run of three straight league defeats by thrashing bottom club Aston Villa 4-0 at Eastlands on Saturday.

It took Pellegrini’s fourth placed team to 50 points with another 30 still to play for over their final 10 matches to be champions.

Leaders Leicester are 10 points clear of City, but Pellegrini feels his players have the experience to overhaul Leicester and title rivals Tottenham and Arsenal with a dra-matic late surge to rival their Premier League triumph in 2014.

“All the teams will lose points between now and the end of the sea-son. As you approach the end of the season, the pressure will increase,” Pellegrini said.

“We have more experience than the other teams, and that will be very important. We need to close that gap.

“We need to beat Norwich next Saturday, and then after that we need to win the next game.

“It is impossible to guess how many points we need to win this title but I am sure it will be around 75.”

Yaya Toure opened the scoring and Raheem Sterling completed the

win, while in between, Sergio Aguero scored twice to take his total for the season to 21 in a City win that was convincing in the end, despite a frus-trating and goalless first half.

Aguero has started 20 of City’s 28 Premier League matches this season, but has been absent with injuries at

important stages, as have fellow key players such as Vincent Kompany and David Silva. “I always say it is a team game not an individual game, but of course there are players who are very important,” Pellegrini said.

“Sergio makes a difference. That’s why maybe three weeks ago, when we

lost against Leicester and Tottenham, I said it was a credit to the squad to be fighting for the title with so many important players like Kompany, Silva and Kun injured.

“Of course, when you have your best players, it is better for the team. When you don’t have them, you need your squad. But if you ask me, I always want to play with Sergio the way he played today.”

Villa look doomed to relegation, sitting nine points adrift of a position of safety with nine games to play.

Manager Remi Garde has taken 12 points from 18 games since his appointment last November, and has been forced to deny claims of a dress-ing room split at the club.

He feels that his reputation as a manager, built in France at Lyon, remains strong, though and was pleased with the way his side kept City at 0-0 before they conceded two goals in the first five minutes of the second half.

“I am very confident in my man-agement. I have no problem with that. I have problems but not with my own management,” he said.

“We were playing away to a team who can win the Champions League and we are bottom. To be too attack-ing would have been suicidal.

“Everybody was pleased with the way we played in the first 45 minutes. We wanted to play the same way and try to exploit one or two opportuni-ties. “The first goal was a big blow, and the second one straight after the first one was a big blow.”

Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini reacts during the English Premier League soccer match against Aston Villa in Manchester, Britain, on Saturday.

Manchester City manager upbeat about regaining the title despite trailing leaders Leicester by 10 points in title race

TOUGH RACE BETWEEN SPURS, CITY AND ARSENAL

McClaren on

the brink as

Newcastle face

relegationReuters

LONDON: Newcastle United manager Steve McClaren made no excuses for his team’s flat display in a 3-1 home defeat by Bourne-mouth on Saturday that left them staring Premier League relegation in the face.

Newcastle are second from bottom after winning only six games this season and the pres-sure on the former England coach is mounting.

“I’m very disappointed. That was definitely a poor perform-ance and ‘going down’ material,” McClaren told the BBC.

“We have got to find the fighters in the team and the per-formance today did not epitomise that. We cannot play like that and hope to stay up.”

Newcastle fell behind to Ste-ven Taylor’s first-half own goal and the St James’ Park crowd, who have not celebrated a major trophy since 1969, turned on McClaren at halftime.

“We are fortunate we’ve got 10 games left and that’s enough,” McClaren said. “It’s a four-team league now and we play every-one around us.”

Newcastle have 24 points, eight ahead of bottom club Aston Villa, level with Norwich City and one behind north-east rivals Sunderland.

“There was a certain edginess and you could see that in our play,” McClaren said.

“We lost our shape. Normally we are a good attacking team but today we were poor on the ball. You can only say that the pressure got to them.”

McClaren, assistant manager to Alex Ferguson at Manchester United before taking charge of Middlesbrough and the England team from 2006-07, remained defiant.

“I can’t see any positives but we have to stick together as a staff and as a team and fight,” he said.

Steve McClaren

Frankfurt sack Veh

after dropping

into bottom three

AFP

BERLIN: Bundesliga strugglers Eintracht Frankfurt yesterday sacked coach Armin Veh after results over the weekend saw the club drop into the relegation places.

Veh’s second stint in Frankfurt lasted just 265 days and Saturday’s dismal 1-1 draw at home to Ingol-stadt, when fans chanted ‘Armin Out’, left Eintracht third from bot-tom and winless in their last seven matches. Werder Bremen climbed out of the bottom three with a 4-1 thrashing of last-placed Hanover 96 on Saturday, pushing Frankfurt down into the relegation places.

Veh lost 11 of his 25 league games in charge with just five wins

“It’s never nice to dismiss a coach,” said Frankfurt chairman Heribert Bruchhagen yesterday.

“It was a very hard decision to make, because up until recently Armin Veh had our confidence.”

Veh previously walked away from Frankfurt at the end of the 2013/14 season after three years as head coach.

His assistant coach Reiner Geyer will take over training ahead of next Saturday’s game against Borussia Moenchengladbach until a permanent replacement is found.

Spurs’ Pochettino rues wasted chance to seize title momentumAFP

LONDON: Mauricio Pochettino admits Tottenham missed an oppor-tunity to step up their Premier League title challenge, after failing to beat 10-man Arsenal in a pulsating 2-2 draw at White Hart Lane.

Pochettino’s side remain in sec-ond place, five points behind leaders Leicester, but the Tottenham man-ager was left frustrated after Spurs squandered a 2-1 lead against their bitter north London rivals.

Alexis Sanchez’s 76th minute equaliser ensured Arsene Wenger’s side escaped with a point, despite having lost Francis Coquelin to a 55th minute red card when they were leading through Aaron Ramsey’s first half goal.

“I think with the way we played we deserved more. At 11 against 11 I think we deserved more and were unlucky in the way we conceded the first goal,” Pochettino said.

“But there are a lot of games ahead; nine games and a lot of points. It is true we missed a big opportunity but in the same way I think Arsenal

is a very good team with very good players. “It is true the feeling is we missed a big opportunity but we need to be positive about that.”

Pochettino insists his young side will not pay for their lack of expe-rience during the title run-in, after a week in which they lost at West Ham and then slipped up against the Gunners.

But he believes his team will ben-efit from their efforts this season, no matter what the outcome of the campaign.

“It’s not about maturity. It’s not about character. These are always the things people say about us,” he said.

“I can give a lot of examples of big clubs with experienced players who concede goals in the last minute.

“Sometimes the opponent can create good chances and it is unlucky but it is not about maturity because all the teams sometimes concede goals like this.

“We have come from a very busy period. All season we have been busy. It is true in the last few months we have played a lot of games.

Ramsey put Arsenal ahead, but Spurs recovered with two goals in two minutes from Toby Alderweireld

and Harry Kane after Coquelin had been dismissed, before Sanchez equalised.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger admits the twists and turns in this season’s title race means he is una-ble to judge whether his side, who sit third, remain in contention.

“I don’t know because I don’t know what to say anymore about that,” Wenger said.

“Everybody drops points so let’s see what happens over the weekend. I think we have to take encouragement from our performance today and reproduce that until the end of the season and we might have a chance.

“Maybe yes, it is our best chance to win the title. Last year we had no chance.

“Three or four years ago I think we were in the race. It shows the team has quality and spirit and our balance was right today.”

Wenger admitted Coquelin was rightly dismissed and criticised his player for collecting two yellow cards, but insisted Spurs’ Eric Dier should also have been sent off.

“I hate to say a lot to Francis after that tackle. He knows. He knows he made a big mistake,” Wenger said .

Leicester pass another

test with flying coloursReuters

LONDON: Leicester City’s unlikely Premier League title challenge took another major upturn with a gritty 1-0 win at Watford on Saturday as their closest challengers cancelled each other out.

Riyad Mahrez conjured a fine goal to see off Watford and send Leicester five points clear at the top after second-placed Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal, who are third, drew 2-2 at White Hart Lane.

“It was an important win, a big battle,” City manager Claudio Rani-eri told the BBC.

“Now there will be battles for everybody not just for us.

“It was a tough match. We cre-ated four or five chances, they created two or three. We are so happy now.”

With nine games remaining,

bookmakers cut the odds on Leices-ter winning their first top-flight crown to 11-10.

“The title is not ours. We have to fight a lot, step by step and keep our feet on the ground. At the end we can see what happens,” Ranieri said.

Algerian Mahrez scored his 15th league goal of the season follow-ing a sweet strike from the edge of the penalty area in the 56th minute before being substituted. Ranieri, though, played down concerns about the inspirational forward’s fitness.

“No injury, he was tired and had a little cramp so I changed him in the late minutes,” the Italian said. “His goal was so important.”

Leicester next host Newcastle United on March 14 before a trip to Crystal Palace.

“We know every team can win or lose so it has to be slowly, slowly,” Ranieri said.

“The desire is so high now and we have a great opportunity.”

Leicester City’s Algerian midfielder Riyad Mahrez (right) celebrates after scoring a goal against Watford during their Premier League match in Watford, north of London on Saturday.

Tottenham’s manager Mauricio

Pochettino gestures

during the Premier League match against

Arsenal in London

yesterday.

SPORT 33MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

Hiddink confident Costa will be fit for PSG clash

AFP

LONDON: Guus Hiddink dismissed concerns over Diego Costa’s fitness by insisting the Spain striker will be available for Chelsea’s crucial Cham-pions League clash with Paris Saint Germain on Wednesday.

Costa missed Saturday’s 1-1 Pre-mier League draw against Stoke as he rested to avoid aggravating a ten-don injury, but Blues interim manager Hiddink is confident his star forward will return for the last 16, second leg against PSG.

With the French champions hold-ing a 2-1 lead, Hiddink can’t afford to be without the in-form Costa, espe-cially as Chelsea laboured without him in a match that prompted the Dutchman to dismiss their top four hopes as “impossible” and set his sights on success in Europe and the FA Cup.

“Diego had a problem on the ten-don, that’s why I was cautious not to worsen the situation, but I think he will be OK on Wednesday,” Hiddink said.

“I think the top four is difficult, almost impossible especially when other teams are knocking on that door.

“I am very respectful of the likes of West Ham who got a good result today (at Everton). On the other hand we know where we came from in December, one point off the relega-tion zone, and amazingly we got safe in a relatively short time.

“We got into mid-table which nor-mally for Chelsea standards is not enough. But if we can go into a very beautiful March and April that would be nice in the Champions League and FA Cup.”

Bertrand Traore, the exciting 20-year-old from Burkina Faso, started in attack in the absence of Costa, and justified his manager’s faith with his second Premier League goal, a spectacular left-footed shot from 20 yards six minutes before the break.

But Stoke pushed Chelsea all the way and were rewarded five min-utes from the end when Mame Diouf headed into an empty net after Thibaut Courtois failed to claim Xherdan Shaqiri’s cross.

“Traore showed in parts of the game he has the quality,” said Hiddink.

“It is a bit different to start at Stamford Bridge. “Young players need control and to dominate their nerves. But he showed with the goal he has a capacity to do a lot.

“We have some young play-ers in the team and they compete in a healthy way. If they show what they can do in training they will be rewarded.

“The match was frustrating, it is always frustrating to concede a late goal. But you can say we started rather sloppy in the first half and after 15-20 minutes we had more composure.

“We scored a beautiful goal through Traore. But they have got some very creative players and in the end it was a fair result.”

Stoke manager Mark Hughes revealed he was going to take off Diouf before his goal.

“I felt we deserved a point,” he said. “Arguably we felt a little bit hard done by.

“We had opportunities, certainly

first half, which we didn’t convert, unfortunately. “And lo and behold we get done with a sucker punch just before half-time.

“You can be a bit deflated, but in fairness it was the complete oppo-site reaction.

“I basically told them to keep doing what you are doing and sec-ond half was more of the same.

“As the half progressed, I felt Chelsea looked to play on the coun-ter attack and we had more control of

the game possession wise. “And there was a feeling in the stadium that we were the more likely team to get the next goal.

“I was a little bit fortunate because I was going to take Mame Diouf off just before he scored. That’s the fortune you need.

“All-in-all, we have once again come here and shown real belief. That’s the first point, I think, Stoke have got from Stamford Bridge since 1984.”

Chelsea’s Diego Costa (right) vies for the ball with Manchester United’s Chris Smalling during their English Premier League match in London, in this February 9, 2016 file photo.

CHAMPIONS LEAGUE MATCH ON WEDNESDAYChelsea’s interim

manager insists Spain striker will be back as they meet the French champions in second leg of last 16

Serie A: Napoli overcome

Chievo to move joint top

AFP

NAPLES: Napoli moved joint top of Serie A after goals from Gonzalo Higuain, Vlad Chiriches and Jose Callejon saw them beat Chievo 3-1 on Saturday and get their title challenge back on track after a three-game mini-slump.

Maurizio Sarri’s side are level on 61 points with reigning cham-pions Juventus after a winning a hugely entertaining encounter in which Chievo, who stay 11th on 34 points, more than played their part and opened the scoring with just over a minute on the clock through Nicola Rigoni.

Napoli also maintain their five-point lead over third-placed Roma, who briefly closed the gap to two with a thumping 4-1 win over Fiorentina in Rome on Friday.

After winning for the first time in nearly a month, Napoli now await the result of Juventus’ trip to Atalanta on Sunday.

“We wanted another type of per-formance today after drawing two games,” said Callejon.

“I think we did that, we worked as a team. Now we’re top, we’ll wait and see for tomorrow, but if we carry on like this we’ll go far.”

Rigoni silenced a rowdy San Paolo stadium when he robbed the dozing Chiriches and drilled past unfortunate Napoli goalkeeper Pepe Reina, who slipped just as he dived to save the Chievo midfielder’s shot.

Napoli looked affronted by the

cheek of the away side, and Higuain swiftly calmed the home fans’ nerves by nipping in front of Bostjan Cesar to meet Faouzi Ghoulam’s low sixth-minute pass and take this season’s remarkable tally to 26 goals in 28 league games.

Napoli created a hatful of chances and should have been fur-ther ahead way before Chiriches’ redeemed himself by meeting Jorginho’s whipped cross with close-range header seven minutes before the break.

Callejon went close twice in the space of a minute, first meet-ing another pinpoint Ghoulam cross only to see his 26th-minute shot blocked, then weakly shooting straight at Chievo keeper Albano Bizzarri when set clean through by the lively Lorenzo Insigne, who missed a golden opportunity of his own when he sliced wide just four minutes after Napoli took the lead.

Napoli wasted more chances in the second half of the match, with Higuain smashing the crossbar in the 66th minute, but Spaniard Callejon finally secured the full three points for his side with 20 minutes to go when he tucked home Allan’s drilled cross.

In Saturday’s early game Samp-doria eased their relegation fears by hammering Hellas Verona 3-0 with goals from Roberto Soriano, Antonio Cassano and Lazaros Christodoulo-poulos in the first half an hour.

The comfortable win sees Samp up to 13th on 31 points and leaves Verona rock bottom of Serie A, nine points from safety.

Napoli’s forward Gonzalo Higuain (left) in action next to referee Marco di Bello during the Italian Serie A match against Chievo Verona at San Paolo Stadium in Naples, on Saturday.

Ten wins in a row as PSV storm four points clear Reuters

AMSTERDAM: PSV Eindhoven claimed a 10th successive league win as they cruised past Groningen 3-0 on Saturday to storm four points clear at the top of the Dutch cham-pionship.

Jetro Willems, continuing his rehabilitation after injury, opened the scoring for the visitors after seven minutes.

A stunning goal from Davy Proepper made it 2-0 in the 51st minute before Juergen Locadia added a third goal as PSV kept their fifth successive clean sheet in the

league. Ajax Amsterdam, who are 20 points clear of third-placed Utrecht, visit Willem II Tilburg later yesterday.

Ruud Boymans scored two goals in four minutes as Utrecht won 4-0 at 10-man Heerenveen.

Utrecht took an early lead through Andreas Ludwig and received a further boost when Heer-enveen’s Joey van den Berg was sent off in the 31st minute for a danger-ous tackle.

Chris Kum grabbed the fourth goal near the end.

PEC Zwolle are seventh after a double from Stef Nijland helped them beat bottom club De Graafschap with a 2-1 score-line.

Cuauhtemoc Blanco, 43, of Club America controls the ball during their Mexican Clausura 2016 tournament football match against Morelia at the Azteca Stadium on Saturday. The match was played in tribute to the former football player and Cuernavaca Mayor who retired from the club. As a footballer, Blanco was known for his attacking ability and played most of his career as a deep-lying forward and his last years as an attacking midfielder. He was also known for his accurate penalties, crucial passes and vision. Blanco is the only Mexican football player with an award in an international FIFA competition, as he won the Silver Ball and the Silver Shoe awards in the 1999 FIFA Confederations Cup. He has been awarded the MVP of the Mexico Primera Division four times.

Veteran Blanco retires

Ruiz misses goal as Benfica beat Sporting Reuters

LISBON: Benfica won 1-0 at Sport-ing after an astonishing miss by Bryan Ruiz as the visitors knocked their neighbours off the top of the Portu-guese league on Saturday.

The Costa Rican somehow man-aged to scoop the ball over an open goal from five metres as Sporting pressed forward in a bid to wipe out Kostas Mitroglou’s first-half goal for champions Benfica.

It was the first time Benfica had beaten their neighbours since former coach Jorge Jesus joined Sporting in a move that shocked Portuguese foot-ball in May, , making it a memorable victory for them.

Jesus, who led Benfica to the last

two league titles, has defeated his old club this season in the Super-cup, the Portuguese Cup and in their first league meeting of the campaign when Sporting won 3-0 at the Sta-dium of Light.

Saturday’s encounter was billed as a grudge match between Jesus and his successor Rui Vitoria.

In January, Jesus dismissively said he did not consider Vitoria to be a coach and that “he is not my colleague”.

Benfica made a confident start and took a deserved lead in the 21st minute when Andreas Samaris’ ball into the area hit Sporting midfielder William Carvalho and fell invitingly for Mitroglou to beat keeper Rui Patricio.

The visitors were missing goal-keeper Julio Cesar through injury but

he was ably replaced by fellow Bra-zilian Ederson. Jefferson crashed a long-range shot against the cross-bar as the home team came alive just before halftime.

Sporting took control in the sec-ond half and Ruiz spurned a good chance when an Islam Slimani cross found him unmarked at the far post and he failed to control the ball.

That miss was completely over-shadowed soon after when Slimani again found Ruiz and this time he lifted the ball over the bar when it was easier to score.

Ruiz nearly made amends one minute later with a dinked effort which Ederson did well to turn away the threat.

Benfica midfielder Renato Sanches was lucky not to be sent off for a wild lunge at Ruiz and Sporting

captain Adrien Silva, who had already been substituted, was sent off from the bench for protesting against the decision.

The win left Benfica with 61 points from 25 matches, two more than second-placed Sporting.

Portugal goalkeeper Rui Patricio has signed an extension to his con-tract with Sporting Lisbon through to 2022, his club announced in a state-ment recently.

The 28-year-old, who has won 38 caps for Portugal, was already under contract until 2018 with the current Portuguese league leaders, where he began his career.

PORTUGUESE LEAGUE

SPORT34 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

The Peninsula

DOHA: Professor Tim Meyer, Chair-man of the German Football Federation (Deutscher Fußballbund-DFB) Medical Commission, long-standing team physi-cian of the German National Team and Director of the FIFA Medical Centre of Excellence in Saarbruecken, Germany visited Aspetar orthopaedic and sports medicine hospital.

The veteran professor was there to learn about its various departments and services, and explore ways in which DFB can benefit from the expertise available.

Professor Meyer praised the advanced and developed level of Aspetar.

“This visit comes as part of a wider tour of the world’s leading sports medi-cine centres specialising in the treatment of football players to explore the unique specialities of each centre,” he said.

“We also selected Aspetar to be on our visit agenda for its reputation and position in the sports medicine field on the inter-national level. I was very impressed with what I have seen in terms of the world-class facilities and services,” Professor Meyer added.

German Football Federation Medical Commission chief visits Aspetar

Professor Tim Meyer, Chairman of the German Football Federation Medical Commission, German National Team’s physician and Director of the FIFA Medical Centre of Excellence in Saarbruecken, Germany looks at the facilities at the Aspetar orthopaedic and sports medicine hospital in Doha.

Jang eases clear to claim victory in Singapore

Reuters

SINGAPORE: Jang Ha-na sank a short eagle putt on the last and immediately broke into a Beyonce-inspired shimmy to celebrate her second win of the season with a brilliant four-shot triumph at the HSBC Women’s Champions yesterday.

The Korean started the day one ahead of the pack but stormed clear on the back nine to close with a seven-under-par 65 for a 19-under total, capped by the gutsy eagle on the par-five last when she took on the lake with a fairway wood to attack the pin.

The effervescent Jang was tracked all the way by playing partner Pornanong Phatlum of Thailand, who closed with a bogey-free 68 but was thwarted once more in her latest attempt to win on tour.

Pornanong now has three second-place finishes in as many years and would have secured victory had it not been for the brilliance of Jang, the Thai fin-ishing four clear of Korea’s Amy Yang in third with a group of five players a further shot back.

Jang started the year by becoming the first player on the LPGA Tour to score a hole-in-one on a par-four in the Bahamas

and has backed that up with a victory in Florida last month and another in Singapore to continue her rich vein of form.

That maiden triumph was celebrated with her self-styled ‘Samurai-lasso’ dance and after inventing a new way to enjoy her victory yesterday, the 23-year-old could soon be running out of ideas to mark each victory as her stock rises on the LPGA Tour.

“This week, I’ve been lis-tening to Beyonce’s music. So I’m watching the concert at the Super Bowl and it looks really nice,” she added. “So I tried to be like Beyonce, the single lady. I’m single right now too, so I try the single lady.”

Jang predicted on Friday she may have “something spe-cial” to perform should she win this week and such was her confidence that she took a stran-glehold of the tournament with an opening-hole birdie on Sun-day and refused to let go.

Two more birdies gave her a three-shot lead over Pornanong at the turn as the chasing pack faltered but the Korean gave the 26-year-old Thai a glimmer of hope with a messy bogey on the 11th which could have been a lot worse. The lead was briefly down to one when the Thai birdied the par-five 12th until Jang matched her moments later to keep the advantage at two shots, before a couple of monster putts led to back-to-back birdies from the 13th to send the Korean clear.

World number one Lydia Ko, who was eight adrift at the start of the day, sizzled on the front nine and moved to within four of the lead on the 12th hole but an error-strewn finish left her 12 shots off the pace in a tie for 15th at seven-under.

Korean secures second win of the season as world number one Lydia Ko falls behind

McIlroy grabs WGC Doral lead with bogey-free 68 AFP

MIAMI: Four-time major champion Rory McIlroy fired a four-under par 68 on Saturday to seize a three-stroke lead after the third round of the World Golf Championships Cadillac Cham-pionship at Doral.

The 26-year-old Northern Irish-man, who hopes to complete a career Grand Slam at next month’s Masters, stood on 12-under 204 after 54 holes at the Blue Monster.

Australian Adam Scott, who owned a two-shot lead over McIlroy when the day began, and US defend-ing champion Dustin Johnson shared second on 207. Two-time Masters

champion Bubba Watson, five-time major winner Phil Mickelson and England’s Danny Willett shared fourth on 209.

Third-ranked McIlroy, who closed with eight consecutive pars, seeks his 12th US PGA Tour title, his first since last May at Quail Hollow, and his 20th career victory worldwide.

“It was good,” McIlroy said. “The wind was coming from a different direction so it made the course play a little bit tougher. I played a solid round of golf, didn’t make any mis-takes. I felt really good about it. I’ll have to do the same thing tomorrow.”

Eighth-ranked Johnson, 31, seeks his 10th career US PGA Tour title and the first since last year at Doral.

Ninth-ranked Scott, 35, seeks his

13th career US PGA title and second in as many weeks after last weekend’s Honda Classic triumph snapped a 21-month win drought for the 2013 Masters champion.

McIlroy birdied the par-5 open-ing hole, blasting his third shot out of a greenside bunker to four feet from the cup to set it up. He sank a seven-foot birdie putt at the fifth and blasted out of a greenside bunker to three feet with his third shot at the par-5 eighth to set up another birdie.

At the par-5 10th, McIlroy found the left rough on his approach but punched his third shot to 17 feet and sank his birdie putt to reach 12-under and seize a two-stroke edge.

McIlroy, using a new left-hand lower putting grip, had some tight

par saves down the stretch. At the par-5 12th, McIlroy’s second shot went way left and his third dropped into a greenside bunker, but he pitched to eight feet and saved par with his putter.

At 18, he found a greenside bun-ker with his approach but pitched out to five feet and made a tense par putt to extend his streak of holes without a dropped shot to 33.

Scott’s run of 16 rounds at par or better, what had been the best active streak on tour, ended on a disappoint-ing day.

The Aussie made bogey at the par-3 fourth, missing the green and a 10-foot par putt, and even when he birdied the par-5 eighth it was after a nine-foot eagle putt miss.

Jang Ha-Na of South Korea holds up the trophy after winning the HSBC Women’s Champions golf tournament, with a score of 19 under par, at the Serapong course in Sentosa, Singapore yesterday.

Marathon man Djokovic levels Davis Cup clash, Britain make last-eight AFP

BELGRADE: World number one Novak Djokovic battled for almost five hours to defeat Mikhail Kukush-kin 6-7 (6/8), 7-6 (7/3), 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 to level the Davis Cup World Group first round tie betwen Serbia and Kaza-khstan yesterday.

Djokovic hit 19 aces and 37 win-ners but committed 94 unforced errors in a four hour 57-minute epic win over world number 79 Kukushkin.

That levelled the tie at 2-2 with Serbia’s Viktor Troicki, the world number 23, to face Aleksandr Nedovyesov in the decisive rubber later yesterday.

Djokovic gave his country a 1-0 lead on Friday by easily defeating Nedovyesov, the world number 200.

But, in the second singles, Kuku-shkin fought back to level 1-1 by beating Troicki 7-5, 6-2, 6-4.

In Sat urday’s doubles, Nedovyesov and Andrey Gol-ubev defeated Djokovic and Nenad Zimonjic 6-3, 7-6 (7/3), 7-5.

That was Djokovic’s first loss in Davis Cup in five years.

Serbia won the Davis Cup in 2010, led by Djokovic.

Meanwhile yesterday, Andy Mur-ray defeated Kei Nishikori 7-5, 7-6 (8/6), 3-6, 4-6, 6-3 in an epic clash as defending champions Great Brit-ain downed Japan to reach the Davis Cup quarter-finals.

Murray, the world number two, had seemed set for a comfortable afternoon against his sixth-ranked opponent by taking the first two sets against a player he had defeated five times in six previous encounters.

But Nishikori battled and even was a break to the good in the decid-ing set before Murray stormed back for victory in five minutes short of five hours. Victory gave Britain an unassailable 3-1 lead in the tie and a place in July’s quarter-finals.

Waiting there will be Novak Djokovic’s Serbia or outsiders Kazakhstan.

TENNIS: DAVIS CUP WORLD GROUP FIRST

ROUND

Britain’s Andy Murray reacts after winning his singles match against Japan’s Kei Nishikori in the Davis Cup world group, first round tennis match between Great Britain and Japan in Birmingham yesterday.

Serbia’s Novak Djokovic reacts after scoring against Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Kukushkin during the Davis Cup World Group first round single match at Aleksandar Nikolic hall in Belgrade yesterday. Djokovic battled for almost five hours to defeat Kukushkin 6-7 (6/8), 7-6 (7/3), 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.

SPORT 35MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

James shines for Cavaliers in win over Boston Celtics

AFP

LOS ANGELES: LeBron James led eight Cleveland players in double-fig-ures with 28 points on Saturday, and reached another milestone in his bril-liant career as the Cavaliers crushed the Boston Celtics 120-103.

James was his usual dominate self, posting 11 rebounds and eight assists in 36 minutes. In the third quarter he passed San Antonio great Tim Duncan (26,366 points) for 14th on the NBA’s all-time scoring list.

James and Duncan have met three times in the NBA Finals, with James’ Miami Heat beating the Spurs in 2013.

“He’s the greatest power forward of all time, if not one of the greatest of all time, period,” said James, who has now scored at least 10 points for the 700th consecutive regular-sea-son game -- third longest streak in NBA history.

“I got so many different stories and so many different things and sit-uations that have been linked to him. Even though he’s a few years older than me, we just stayed linked.

“I just think what he’s done for

this league. You look at a guy like that and it kind of puts you right back in place.”

Kyrie Irving scored 20 points, Iman Shumpert posted a career-high 16 rebounds to go with 12 points off the bench, and JR Smith tallied 14 points on four three-pointers.

Isaiah Thomas led Boston with 27 points. Jared Sullinger added 17 points and 13 rebounds for the Celtics, who had their five-game winning streak halted.

Boston led 35-22 after one quar-ter, shooting 60 percent. The Celtic’s 35 points tied the most points Cleve-land has allowed in a first quarter all season. Cleveland countered with a 12-0 surge in the second quarter.

The Cavaliers led by eight points after three quarters. They extended their lead to 16 points with just under three minutes to go on the final play from James.

Jeff Teague scored 22 points as the Atlanta Hawks came back from a 17-point deficit to beat the Los Ange-les Clippers 107-97 at Staples Center.

Paul Millsap scored 20 points and grabbed 18 rebounds for Atlanta, who surrendered 37 points in the first quarter. Kent Bazemore tallied 17 points as Atlanta moved to within 1 1/2 games of Miami for first place in the Southeast Division.

DeAndre Jordan had 17 points and 11 rebounds, while Chris Paul earned 17 and 11 assists -- but it was not enough for the Clippers, who had a disappointing follow up to their comeback win over the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday.

Paul George hit two free throws with three seconds left en route to a 38-point performance as the Indiana Pacers defeated the Washington Wiz-ards 100-99.

George’s free throws came after

Nene made one of two free throws for the Wizards with 10 seconds left for a 99-98 lead. Bradley Beal scored 12 points for Washington in his first start since February 11, but the guard didn’t finish the game. Fouled by Pacers Ian Mahinmi while going for a layup, Beal landed hard on his side and had to be helped off the court. The team said he suffered sprained pelvis.

Beal missed 20 of Washington’s first 61 games.

Pau Gasol finished with 28 points, 17 rebounds and six assists as the Chi-cago Bulls held on for a 108-100 win over the Houston Rockets.

Jimmy Butler scored 24 points and grabbed 11 rebounds in his first game back since injuring his left knee Feb-ruary 5. Derrick Rose scored 17 points on six-for-10 shooting. Gasol posted his team-leading 35th double-dou-ble of the season as Chicago halted a four-game losing skid.

Jimmy Butler (21) of the Chicago Bulls fouls Dwight Howard 0of the Houston Rockets at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois, on Saturday. The Bulls defeated the Rockets 108-100.

NHL: Ducks beat Kings 3-2 to take division leadAgencies

LOS ANGELES: The Anaheim Ducks are back in a familiar spot — alone in first place in the Pacific Division for the first time this season after winning three straight division titles.

Two victories over the Los Angeles Kings six days apart helped them complete their remarkable comeback. David Perron scored the go-ahead goal on a power play in the second period and the Ducks broke a franchise record with their 11th consecutive victory, beating their Southern California rivals 3-2 on Saturday.

“It’s always a good thing to set new records, but that’s not something

we focus too much on during the season,” forward Jakob Silfverberg said. “We just try to win games. Obviously if you set a record, you’ve been doing something well.”

The Ducks trailed the Kings by as many as 16 points on the morning of January 20. But since then, Anaheim has gone 18-1-1 and Los Angeles 9-9-1. The teams each have 18 games left, including one more matchup on April 7 at Los Angeles. “I think they always believed,” coach Bruce Boudreau said. “I mean, we haven’t changed much from what we did last year. There were a couple of big meetings, and we converted our style just a little bit.”

Los Angeles Kings’ Drew Doughty, left, and Anaheim Ducks’ Corey Perry, center, watch the puc …

The Ducks lead the season series 3-1 and have won 11 of the past 14 regular-season meetings overall — including a 4-2 victory last Sunday at Honda Center.

Cleveland star moves another spot higher on the NBA all-time scoring list, overtakes Spurs star Duncan

Hamza of Camels 1 breaks away from the French defence during the Qatar Rugby Sevens at Aspire Zone in Doha on Saturday night.

Camels cruise to win in Qatar Rugby SevensThe Peninsula

DOHA: Powerful sevens Qatar inter-national and Camels 2 utility forward Rakan Mutawaa pulled off 4 big tries to trigger a huge win for his Camels team against the Lions at the Aspire warm up and purpose built Rugby pitch.

The Camels 2 second match was against the North Atlantic College (CNAQ). The match started off as a rip-per with strong plays from both teams but it was the Camels 2 far too strong in end for the college boys defeating them 24 -5.

CNAQ had better fortunes in their second match when they slugged it out against the luckless Blue Falcons. Their

bullocking charges and fast strong play of the scrum allowed the college boys to overpower their opponents 22 nil. This was CNAQ’s first registered win of the season.

The Lion’s woes however, did not get improve as they faced competi-tion leaders Camels 1 in their second match. Things looked promising for the one time former champs as they trailed at the break 14 nil. However, the roar of the Lions could not be heard as the Camels rolled in five sec-ond halve tries to take the match 47 nil.

The Camels 1 further demon-strated their prowess by dominating the final match of the night against the Blue Falcons beating them 50 -7.

Qatar to host Asian Rugby tri-nation event next month

The Peninsula

DOHA: The Qatar Rugby Fed-eration (QRF) will host the Asian Rugby tri-nation championship, it was announced here yesterday.

The Asia Rugby competi-tion involving the national rugby teams of Iran and Lebanon is part of QRF’s efforts to further boost and promote rugby in the country.

The three matches will be played at the Aspire warm track from April 16 -22.

The first match of the competi-tion will see Qatar up against Iran on April 16, the second match will be between Iran and Lebanon on April 19 with the final match fought out between Qatar and Lebanon on 22 April.The Asia Rugby Champi-onship is an annual rugby union competition held amongst national rugby sides within the Asia Rugby region. The competition formerly known as the Asian Five Nations changed its name in 2015.

Speaking about the April championship QRF President Yousef Al Kuwari said, “Naturally we are delighted and excited to host the tournament which will help develop the sport in the coun-try. Our players will get the needed exposure playing against these two teams”.

He continued “Last week we had the Asia Rugby consult-ant Aaron Stockdale here and he gave us the thumps up for our operations and facilities. We are overwhelmed at the opportunity to co-host this tri-nation’s cham-pionship with Asia Rugby.

Vancouver Canucks goalie Jacob Markstrom (25) saves a shot on goal by San Jose Sharks right wing Joonas Donskoi (27) in the third period of their NHL game at SAP Center at San Jose. San Jose Sharks lost to Vancouver Canucks 2 to 4.

NHL ResultsMinnesota 3 Buffalo 2

Calgary 4 Pittsburgh 2

Nashville 5 Colorado 2

Anaheim 3 Los Angeles 2

Washington 2 Boston 1

Ottawa 3 Toronto 2

Tampa Bay 4 Carolina 3

Philadelphia 6 Columbus 0

Winnipeg 4 Montreal 2

Arizona 5 Florida 1

Vancouver 4 San Jose 2

NBA ResultsNY Knicks 98 Miami 90

Indiana 95 Orlando 86

Cleveland 121 Washington 115

Detroit 99 Boston 94

Toronto 91 Brooklyn 74

Denver 78 Minnesota 74

Dallas 100 New Orleans 91

San Antonio 123 Utah 98

Phoenix 111 Charlotte 102

Oklahoma City 112 Memphis 94

LA Clippers 109 Portland 98

Denver Broncos’ quarterback Peyton Manning holds the Vince Lombardi Trophy after the Broncos defeated the Carolina Panthers in the NFL’s Super Bowl 50 football game in Santa Clara, California in this February 7, 2016 file photo. Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning has decided to retire from the NFL

Peyton Manning retiring

after 18-year NFL career

Reuters

NEW YORK: Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning has decided to retire from the NFL, bringing an end to a career that will surely land him in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the team said yes-terday.

Manning, who turns 40 later this month, will be going out on top after helping the Broncos to a Super Bowl upset victory last month over the Carolina Panthers, in a devel-opment first reported by ESPN.

“When you look at every-thing Peyton has accomplished as a player and person, it’s easy to see how fortunate we’ve been to have him on our team,” John Elway, Broncos Executive Vice President of Football Operations and Gen-eral Manager, said in a statement.

“Peyton was everything that we thought he was and even more-not only for the football team but in the community. I’m very thankful Peyton chose to play for the Denver Broncos, and I congratulate him on his Hall of Fame career.”

The decision came as the Broncos faced a Wednesday

deadline in which Manning would be guaranteed $19m from Den-ver for the 2016 National Football League season if he remained on the team’s roster.

One of the most prolific pas-sers ever in the NFL, Manning revolutionized the quarterback position during an 18-year career that included two Super Bowl titles, five most valuable player awards and a slew of passing records.

Manning came across as a laid back southern boy but on the gridiron he was a clinical, ruthless competitor with an off-the-charts football IQ who changed plays at the line of scrimmage to outsmart opposing defenses with his dead-on accuracy.

He played his final four sea-sons in Denver but his prime came during the 14 years he spent in Indianapolis where he led the Colts to two Super Bowls berths, winning the big game in the 2006 campaign.

In addition to his career yards and passing touchdowns records and his record five MVP awards, Manning’s Super Bowl win gave him an NFL record 200 career wins including playoffs.

Mohammed Al Subaei, Assistant Secretary-General of Qatar Basketball Federation, is seen conducting the draws of the Qatar Cup and Emir’s Cup, in front of team managers, officials and members of the media. The Qatar Cup will be held from March 9 to 29. The season-ending Emir’s Cup will be held from April 3 to 22, QBF said. RIGHT: A view of the draw ceremony.

Aisha Hussam Saber lifts her trophy after winning at Ladies International Endurance Ride which ended at Sealine, yesterday. BELOW: Riders celebrate after the race.

Qatar Cup, Emir’s Cup draws ceremony

Ladies Endurance Ride

36 MONDAY 7 MARCH 2016

QBF and QSports to organise 3x3 basketball tournament

The Peninsula

DOHA: Several outfits with a flavour of Qatar’s top-notch players will be seen in action at the 3x3 Basketball tournament to be held on a special portable basketball court inside the 01 Mall in Ain Khalid starting this weekend.

QSports and Qatar Basketball Federation (QBF) are once again collaborating to host a unique tour-nament scheduled from March 10-12.

Organised by QSports, “The 01 Mall Novo Cine-mas 3x3 Basketball Tour” has been created as part of series of Doha 3x3 tours that will be organised throughout the year.

The 3-day tournament is open to the general public and will feature up to 32 teams in each of the 3 divisions—Open, Classic and Women’s.

The Open division is for the competitive players while the Classic division has a height restriction of 5’ 11”.

Players from the Qatar National Women’s basketball team are also participating with one professional women player allowed in any wom-en’s team. Games are expected to begin at 7:00pm on the first day of the event while the finals will start at 8pm on the concluding day.

“With technical assistance from the QBF, the tournament will be uploaded on the FIBA 3x3 Planet and teams will be ranked based on their partici-pation levels” says Issam Al Sarout of the Qatar Basketball Federation.

The tournament’s popularity is growing as over

30 teams have already registered in the first week of registrations.

Plenty of activities and surprises await the spec-tators, especially kids and families, with prizes and special discounts at the 01 Mall. On lookers can compete in free throw and short competitions and win gift vouchers from Mall shops such as Dom-inos, Kebabs N Curries, Mega Mart and Suleiman Jewellers. Kids and families

One of the highlights will be 3 exhibition games on Saturday that will feature kids from the QSports

Basketball Academy, QB Hoops Academy and BE Basketball Academy.

Coach Yusef Aziz of QSports Basketball Acad-emy says: “It’s a great opportunity for young players to witness such competitions for motiva-tion and learn valuable skills by being a part of such tournaments.”

Wassim Soubrawa, Chief Operations Officer of 01 Mall further said: “We are excited to promote grass roots sports in Qatar and are delighted to host the 3x3 basketball at 01 Mall.”

A file photo of 3x3 Basketball

tournament held last year.

The March 10-12 event includes three divisions with several teams confirming participation, say organisers

CHI Al Shaqab: A memorable family experienceThe Peninsula

DOHA: CHI Al Shaqab 2016 wel-comed a massive audience over the four days of the event.

Attendees included dedicated fans of equestrianism, as well as families who enjoyed the competitive drama of the sport alongside an array of entertainment activities.

The weekend saw a huge number of attendees, who engaged widely with the amusement areas of the venue.

Al Shaqab hosted a number of food stalls at the venue including Chef’s Garden Restaurant, operated by AMLAK Hospitality, which experi-enced considerable traffic throughout the event.

“The view and ambience of this spot is so beautiful that people come and occupy tables for long hours,” said Pradeep Kumara, the Food and Bev-erage manager.

“They love to watch the show while enjoying our food. We have a

maximum capacity to seat 40 people so we have a long line of guests wait-ing to be seated,” Kumara expressed his wish to expand the seating area of the restaurant at the next year’s CHI Al Shaqab.

Cafe Station, with its unique blend of coffee and Gharissa Ice-cream,servedover 200 guests each day, most of them families with children.

Altseenat Cafe received a large number of international riders who visited the stall to enjoy Arabic cof-fee after their performance.

As the competitions progressed in the afternoons, Popcorn Girl was par-ticularly popular with its iced drinks and sweet snacks.

Immediately outside the arena were carriages, pulled by beautiful German horses, that took an aver-age of 150 children each day for rides around the venue.

Pony rides were also popular among youngsters, and many families relaxed at the Entertainment Zone as they watched their toddlers get busy with colourful arts.

Face painting was a favourite, fol-lowed closely by water painting and touch-screen digital colouring.

Meanwhile, the horse paintings by British painter Louis Bird attracted

the eye of every passerby, and the stalls exhibiting beautiful, traditional Qatari garments and furniture were-added a further dash of local style and sophistication.

Ultimately, CHI Al Shaqab 2016 was an undeniable success, both as a prestigious equestrian competition and as a prominent go-to spot for fun-loving families.

A steward gives a ride to a young girl during

CHI Al Shaqab 2016 which

concluded on Saturday.

Qatar Asian Junior Tennis

event begins in Doha

The Peninsula

DOHA: Around 80 players from all over the continents are featuring at the Qatar Asian Junior U-14 tourna-ment which kicked off in Doha on Saturday.

The Qatar Tennis Federation (QTF) is hosting the event at the Kha-lifa International Tennis and Squash Complex .

Apart from the hosts, players from a total of 16 countries including the UAE, Turkey, Pakistan, Australia and Lebanon are vying for the top

honour. Ibrahim Al Khelaifi, Deputy Head of National team Committee, hoped the event will give Qatari players a good experience.

“The QTF spares no effort to proved the Qatari players with opportunities to put our national team on the right track in order to improve their Asian ranking,” he said .

The Qatari team includes Mohammad, Al Sulaiti, Ghanim Al Khelaifi, Ibrahim Al Sulaiti, Has-san Al Obaidli, Jassim Al Mahmoud, Abdulaziz Zainal and Rayyan Al Jefairi. The final of the event will be played on March 11.

Qatar’s curling

team formed

The Peninsula

DOHA: In a pioneer step for the first time in the Arab sport his-tory, Qatar curling team has been launched under the supervision of Qatar Winter Sports Commit-tee (QWSC) in Doha recently.

The launch ceremony was attended by Rashid Magid Al Sulaiti, President of Qatar Curling Federation (QCF), Adel Sharida, the Secretary General of QCF beside the QCF board members and staff.

Curling in its early days was played on frozen lochs and ponds.

A pastime still enjoyed in some countries when weather permits, but all national and international competitive curling competitions now take place in indoor rinks with the condition of the ice care-fully temperature-controlled.

Qatar curling team has started training and is due to participate in the upcoming Inter-national Curling Championship scheduled in Sweden in April.