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Rediff.com, Feb 18, 2018 Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, Arvind Subramanian, has called for increasing privatisation of public sector banks and implementing stricter banking rules. His views come against the backdrop of recent developments in a few PSBs. While Punjab National Bank detected fraudulent transactions amounting to more than $1.77 billion from one of its branches in Mumbai, Bank of Baroda has decided to shut down its South African operations after a scandal was unearthed. The country's largest government-owned lender, the State Bank of India (SBI) had also reported loans frauds. Addressing the Madras Management Association (MMA) Annual Convention in Chennai on Saturday, Subramanian said two key questions arose on the way forward for the banking industry: first, if not now, when? second, if not this, what?. While stating that the internal controls in a bank had broken down for whatever reasons, the CEA wondered what happened to the ext...

The Times of India, Chidanand Rajghattal, Feb 18, 2018 WASHINGTON: The Cold War between the United States and Russia is back - except it is now digitized, although driven by humans, bots have taken the place of agents, and the IRA has replaced the KGB as the new American bogey. The Trump administration on Friday broadly acknowledged that Russian meddling in the US Presidential election of 2016 is "beyond dispute" after the FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities with conspiracy to defraud the United States. In the focus of US attention is IRA, which stands for Internet Research Agency, and is said to be a "troll farm" based in St Petersburg, Russia that employed scores of people to deploy bogus social media postings to influence the elections in favor of Trump and against Hillary Clinton. The indictment described the IRA as an organized bureaucracy backed by an annual budget of millions of dollars...

News18.com, Rounak Kumar Gunjan, Feb 19, 2018 Kanpur:   Just days after the Punjab National Bank (PNB) Rs 11,360 crore fraud came to light, another state-run bank has reported a million dollar scam. The parent company of Rotomac Pens has been accused of fleeing with loans of more than Rs 800 crore from various government banks in the country. According to sources, the owner of the company, Vikram Kothari, had taken a loan of more than Rs 800 crores from five government banks. Sources have confirmed that Allahabad Bank, Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Indian Overseas Bank and Union Bank of India compromised their rules to render these loans to Kothari. Kothari took a loan of Rs 485 crore from Union Bank of India and a loan of Rs 352 crore from Allahabad Bank. A year later, Kothari has been reported to not have paid back either the interest or the loaned amount. Kothari's office in Kanpur’s City Center road has been locked for the past week. Kothari, too, has be...

The Indian Express, Sushant Singh, Feb 16, 2018 WITH TENSIONS rising on the Line of Control, the Army has given “adequate freedom” to its commanding officers and post commanders to initiate action and retaliate against Pakistani action on the LoC, sources told  The Indian Express. This move is part of the proactive stance adopted by the Army against Pakistani posts on the LoC since September 2016, when it conducted surgical strikes against terror launch pads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Sources said the Army “has been able to establish moral ascendancy on the LoC and undertake proactive tactical actions” to prevent Pakistan from activating its terror launch pads on the LoC in the coming summer season. According to estimates of the Northern Command, headquartered in Udhampur, 375-400 militants are waiting on the Pakistani side of the LoC, ready to infiltrate into Kashmir. Sources said that since Kashmir experienced less snowfall this winter, the Pakistan Army is e...

Deccan Chronicle, Anupma Mili, Feb 16, 2018 KOZHIKODE: As Childhood Cancer Day is observed on Thursday, nearly 1,000 new cases are reported in the state, according to oncologists. However, the patients have to depend on the Regional Cancer Centre in the state capital or private hospitals for expert treatments as government medical colleges lack pediatric oncologists. “When nearly 1,000 cases are reported new, only 600 patients are reaching the RCC in Thiruvananthapuram. Less than 100 patients are rich enough  to get treatment at the  private super speciality hospitals in the state or  outside. And the rest have to depend only on the  government medical colleges here,” says Dr Narayanankutty Warrier, medical director at MVR Cancer Centre and Research Institute. He added that the number of seats to learn the doctorate in medicine course is very few, limited to one or two in the state and that is the main reason for the medical colleges in the government secto...

      The Hindu, Mohammad Ali, Feb 16, 2018 Life in Rani Bazaar area of Saharanpur went on as usual on Thursday but the centre of attention was a decrepit two-floor house, with its plaster coming off and gate almost falling away. It is the house where the Gupta brothers, Ajay, Atul and Rajesh, grew up and lived till they left the country to become the industrial tycoons of South Africa and close allies of Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa. South Africa may have turned hostile to the brothers but the residents of Rani Bazaar continue to tell “inspiring stories” of the meteoric rise of the sons of the soil. “The Gupta brothers are the best thing to have happened to Saharanpur,” declared Javed Sabri, a family friend of the South African industrialists, while standing in front of their ancestral house. The three brothers were inspired by their father Shiv Kumar Gupta, a small time trader who ran a company which distributed soapstone powder in the city, sai...

The Economics Times, Pratik Bhakta, Feb 16, 2018 After months of anticipation, WhatsApp rolled out its payments feature to select users across the country to much enthusiasm this week, providing a strong boost to India’s digital payments ecosystem. But that didn’t almost happen because of the company’s foreign origin. Turns out, this was WhatsApp’s second endeavour to enter India’s payments market.  Last year, the messaging app, the largest in India, tried to partner with a private bank in the country to develop a digital wallet app to facilitate payments on its platform. That was when it ran into a reluctant Reserve Bank of India. The regulator was not ready to allow a foreign entity to enter India’s digital payments space, according to multiple stakeholders ET spoke with to piece together the story behind WhatsApp payments.  “Non-bank entities applying for authorisation shall be a company incorporated in India and registered under the Companies Act 1956 ...

Dailyhunt  February 18, 2018 Punjab National Bank officials (PNB) arrested in connection with the fraudulent transaction scam were sanctioned fixed commission for granting Letters of Undertaking (LoU), the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) revealed on Sunday. As per CBI sources, arrested bank officials, during interrogation, disclosed that for every LoU, a commission was fixed depending on the amount to be sanctioned as loan. Commission in exchange of issuing the aforementioned document was distributed between all employees of PNB involved in it, the CBI said. Furthermore, the investigative agency stated that the involvement and connivance of more staff members and outsiders, including accused jewellery designer Nirav Modi and relative Mehul Choksi is being probed. Earlier in the week, PNB detected a 1.77 billion dollars scam in which jeweller Nirav Modi acquired fraudulent letters of undertaking from one of its branches for overseas credit from other Indian...

Financial Express February 18, 2018 Gupta brothers have been provided 'Z' category security by the Uttarakhand government. The brothers Ajay, Rajesh and Atul, all in their 40s, are under investigation for their close connection with Jacob Zuma. Gupta brothers have been provided ‘Z’ category security by the Uttarakhand government. The brothers Ajay, Rajesh and Atul, all in their 40s, are under investigation for their close connection with Jacob Zuma. Zuma resigned as the President of South Africa on February 15 over corruption scandals. The Gupta brothers had shifted to South Africa from UP’s Saharanpur in 1993. They own a property in Dehradun, including a palatial house in the city’s Curzon Road locality. All the three were given ‘Y’ category security by the Congress government, however, last yeat BJP regime upgraded it. Anand Bardhan, Principal Secretary (Home) in an interview with The Sunday Express said that the Gupta brothers were being provided with ‘Y’ sec...

Financial Express February 18, 2018 Other pacts included avoidance of double taxation and the prevention of fiscal evasion with respect to taxes on income, ratification of extradition treaty, exemption from visa requirement for holders of diplomatic passports, traditional systems of medicine and establishment of an expert group on trade remedy measures. In addition to these nine pacts, four more pacts were inked on the sidelines of Rouhani’s visit between the two countries, officials said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday held “substantive” talks on key issues of terrorism, security, trade and energy, after which the two sides inked nine pacts, including a lease contract for a part of Chabahar port’s operation for 18 months. The two leaders also deliberated on regional situations during their wide-ranging talks. Addressing a joint press event with Rouhani, Modi said the two countries want a terror-free world and they were committe...

THE HINDU Mubashir Zaidi February 17, 2018 Last week, two Pakistani Ministers, Ahsan Iqbal and Miftah Ismail, and Foreign Secretary Tehmina Janjua rushed to Western capitals as back home the government ordered freezing and seizure of assets belonging to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and its subsidiary Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF). Both groups are linked to Hafiz Saeed, the alleged mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, and have been declared terrorist outfits by the UN, the U.S. and India. The Ministers’ goal was to convince Western countries to accept the crackdown on the JuD and the FIF as credible steps against terror and not to support a motion the U.S. and the U.K. are planning to present at a Financial Action Task Force meeting against Pakistan. The motion seeks to place the country on the global terror financing watchlist. The FATF meeting is opening on Sunday and will continue its deliberations till February 23. Mr. Ismail, the de facto Finance Minister...

The Economic Times February 18, 2018 Pakistan has contracted another foreign commercial loan of $500 million from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) to shore up its depleting reserves.  The Express Tribune reported that with the new borrowing the Chinese financial institution's contribution to supporting a strong rupee against the US dollar increased to $1 billion in just three months.  It further reported quoting sources in the finance ministry that the government contracted the  loan on January 15 at a rate in the range of 4.5 per cent.  In January, the country took a total of $704 million worth of new loans, taking foreign borrowings to $6.6 billion in just seven months of this fiscal year, sources said.  The foreign loans were equal to 86 per cent of the annual budgetary estimates that parliament had approved in June last year. This suggests that foreign loans for the second consecutive year may cross USD 10 billion....