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MIDDLE EAST MONITOR February 21, 2020 The Central Bank of the UAE is investigating the largest bank in Pakistan to determine whether it has violated laws prohibiting money laundering and financing terrorism. The UAE Central Bank (CBUAE) said in a statement on Wednesday that it was “in contact” with the Pakistan banking regulator to verify possible violations regarding a Pakistani bank operating in the UAE. A spokesman for CBUAE told  Reuters  that the statement refers to Habib Bank Ltd (HBL), the largest bank in Pakistan. CBUAE added in the statement that it will take “appropriate regulatory action once we have verified the findings reported in the media to confirm if there was any violation to UAE’s Anti-Money Laundering and Combat of Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) laws and procedures”. Bloomberg  revealed last week that in 2018 Pakistan banking regulators found irregularities in HBL’s UAE operations and dealings with politically exposed clients. The investigation com

Counter Punch February 21, 2020 In 2017, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Hilal Elver, and UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics, Baskut Tuncak, produced a report that called for a comprehensive new global treaty to regulate and phase out the use of dangerous pesticides in farming and move towards sustainable agricultural practices. In addition to the devastating impacts on human health, the two authors argued that the excessive use of pesticides contaminates soil and water sources, causing loss of biodiversity, the destruction of the natural enemies of pests and the reduction in the nutritional value of food.  They drew attention to denials by the agroindustry of the hazards of certain pesticides and expressed concern about aggressive, unethical marketing tactics that remain unchallenged and the huge sums spent by the powerful chemical industry to influence policymakers and contest scientific evidence. At the time, Elver said that agroecological approaches, which replace

THE INDIAN EXPRESS February 22, 2020 A prestigious annual conference on geo-economics organised by the Ministry of External Affairs is moving to Pune this year from Mumbai, where it used to be held earlier. The three-day event, rechristened as the Asia Economic Dialogue, would be held at the Pune International Centre (PIC) from February 28 to March 1. Over 150 participants from 12 countries are listed to participate, with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri expected to be among the speakers. Business leaders like Uday Kotak, Baba Kalyani and Kumar Mangalam Birla are also among the speakers. The event would seek to serve as a platform for influential political and business leaders and policy makers to showcase, and talk about, the developments in Asian countries that are now driving the global economy. “Asia’s emergence as the economic powerhouse of the world is the story of this century. Very soon, Asia would be contributing

THE INDIAN EXPRESS February 22, 2020 Days after top police officers in Jammu and Kashmir said that they will take strict action against those “misusing” social media in the Valley, the police have arrested two people in two separate cases in North Kashmir’s Kupwara district. While one person was arrested by the Kupwara Police several days ago, another youth has been arrested by the police in Handwara. A statement issued by Handwara Police said on Friday that one “rumour-monger has been arrested for spreading hatred on social media”. “We received information that some youths are circulating fake news and spreading rumours, hatred through social media platforms. A case was registered and one person has been arrested,” the police statement said. The man was identified as Waseem Majeed Dar. The earlier arrest was that of a Srinagar resident. He was arrested after a case was registered against him in Kupwara, after he allegedly posted on social media that security forces cau

THE INDIAN EXPRESS February 22, 2020 The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Friday suggested that in case of merger of telcom companies and their licences, only the revenue of the company should be taken into account for other services like national and international long distance telephony. Apart from that, the one-year timeline currently allowed for merger and transfer of licences should exclude the time taken by the companies in litigation, Trai suggested. The sectoral regulator also suggested that guidelines for such transfers and mergers of licences should not be ‘hard code’.The guidelines, Trai suggested, should take into consideration the that from about 14 operators a decade ago, it has come down to just four. Trai has now released its recommendations on reforming the guidelines for transfer and merger of telecom licences, after the telecom department in May 2019 sought its views on enabling simplification and fast-tracking of approvals. Trai’s suggestio

THE INDIAN EXPRESS February 22, 2020 Total impaired assets of the banking sector have remained at Rs 16,88,600 crore, or 15.7 per cent of the total advances of banks, as of December 2019, despite a decline in gross non-performing assets (NPAs) to Rs 910,800 crore, or 9.2 per cent of the advances, according to the latest report from global banking group Credit Suisse. Impaired assets of banks include both gross NPAs — loans that are due for repayment after 90 days and NPAs written off by lenders. Total write-offs since FY2014 have amounted to Rs 777,800 crore, 7.3 per cent of the total bank advances, as per the data. “System gross NPAs have continued to moderate and are down to 9.2 per cent versus 11.7 per cent in FY18. While part of this has been driven by improved recoveries, a large part continues to be led by increasing write-offs,” it said. The global banking group has forecast a rise in bad loans in the coming months from the banking sector’s total loan portfolio of aroun

THE INDIAN EXPRESS February 22, 2020 As India receives Donald Trump on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be eager to get a first-hand briefing from the US President on his plans for the Af-Pak region and the Gulf — two regions vital to India’s economic, political and military security. The impending withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan and the downsizing of the American security role in the Gulf region mark the end of an important era in India’s northwestern frontiers — both land and maritime. The question is whether Modi and Trump can overcome the past reluctance in both capitals to collaborate in the regions west of India. On the face of it, there is a good fit between America’s downward adjustment in the region under Trump, and India’s ambition to play a larger role in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Over the last three years of the Trump presidency, Delhi and Washington had developed a broad understanding on how to secure the Indo-Pacific that the US had define

THE INDIAN EXPRESS February 22, 2020        Raising questions over Pakistan’s intent in agreeing to throw open the Kartarpur Corridor, the Punjab Police chief, Dinkar Gupta, Friday said the visa-free passage cleared for Sikh pilgrims was “a huge security challenge from terrorism point of view”. Claiming that there were reasons why the Corridor was not opened all these years, Director General of Punjab Police said that some elements based in the neighboring country were “trying to woo the pilgrims and making overtures to them”. “Kartarpur offers a potential that you send somebody in the morning as an ordinary chap and by evening he comes back as trained terrorist actually. You are there for six hours, you can be taken to a firing range, you can be taught to make an IED,” Gupta said. He was speaking at The Indian Express Idea Exchange in Panchkula. The Corridor, connecting Dera Baba Nanak in Punjab’s Gurdaspur district with the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Pakistan’s Karta

THE INDIAN EXPRESS February 22, 2020            In a stern warning to Pakistan which managed to stay on the “grey list”, global terrorist financing watchdog Financial Action Task Force (FATF), chaired by China, told Islamabad that “all deadlines” have expired and if they don’t prosecute and penalize terrorist financing by June 2020, the FATF will take action which will have financial consequences. In effect, Pakistan could face the FATF “blacklist” if it failed to implement the remaining action plan by June 2020. The FATF, in its plenary meeting held in Paris from February 16-21, expressed serious concerns on Pakistan’s failure to complete its 27-point action plan in line with the agreed timeline which ended in September 2019. This was the key takeaway after the FATF plenary session ended Friday. FATF President Xiangmin Liu of the People’s Republic of China chaired the plenary — China has the presidency until June. In a significant development, as first reported by The

GULF NEWS February 21, 2020         The World Health Organization warned Friday that the window to stem the deadly coronavirus outbreak was shrinking, amid concern over a surge in cases with no clear link to China. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has for weeks insisted the low number of cases of COVID-19 outside the epicentre of the deadly outbreak in China's central Hubei province presented a "window of opportunity" to contain the international spread. But as cases surged across the Middle East and in South Korea Friday, he cautioned for the first time that while "we are still in a phase where containment is possible... our window of opportunity is narrowing." He warned that if countries did not quickly mobilise to fight the spread of the virus, "this outbreak could go in any direction. It could even be messy." The outbreak which began in December has already killed more than 2,200 people and infected more than 75,500 i

THE HINDU-BUSINESS LINE February 20, 2020 A class of creditors may soon be allowed to seek an alternate ‘Authorized Representative’ (AR) to represent their claims and deal with their grievances if they are not satisfied with the performance of their present AR. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) proposes to amend the Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process (CIRP) to enable the creditors in a class to replace an AR with 66 per cent of voting power of the class, similar to the replacement of a Resolution Professional (RP) in a CIRP. The insolvency regulator has sought public comments on this through a discussion paper. Currently, there is no explicit provision for the replacement of an AR once he/she is appointed by the Adjudicating Authority. The IBBI also proposes to amend CIRP regulations to stipulate that where more than one compliant resolution plan is available, both/all the plans should be put to vote simultaneously. The plan that receives the h

THE TELEGRAPH February 21, 2020 A study that surveyed 3,901 households in 10 districts of Jharkhand has found that nearly 88 per cent of ration cards cancelled around three years ago belonged to genuine households. The startling finding underscores the pitfalls of extreme decisions taken on the basis of a document-driven filtering process and comes at a time similar concerns have been expressed about the new citizenship matrix. The revelation is all the more shocking because several deaths then were linked to suspected starvation arising from the dispossession of the ration cards although the then BJP government never accepted that any loss of life was caused by hunger. The Jharkhand report, drawn up by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar, was based on a survey conducted for Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), co-founded by economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who won the Nobel prize last year. Titled “Identity verific