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 mint Sep 25, 2020 J.Jagannath UK telecom major Vodafone Group Plc on Friday won an international arbitration against India over retrospective tax demand of  ₹ 20,000 crore. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that conduct of Income Tax Department is in breach of 'fair and equitable' treatment. Vodafone was represented at The Hague by DMD Advocates. The tribunal ruled that the Indian government's imposition of a tax liability on Vodafone is in breach of the investment treaty agreement between India and the Netherlands, Reuters reported while quoting a source. The tribunal, in its ruling, said the government must cease seeking the dues from Vodafone and should also pay 4.3 million pounds ($5.47 million) to the company as partial compensation for its legal costs, the source said. Spurred by the news, on Friday  Vodafone Idea's  scrip on BSE closed 12% higher at  ₹ 10.20. The tax dispute stems from Vodafone's acquisition of the Indian mobile asset...

 The Telegraph Sep 25, 2020 Harley-Davidson Inc said on Thursday it would discontinue its sales and manufacturing operations in India, effectively abandoning the world’s biggest motorcycle market after a decade of unsuccessful efforts to gain a foothold. The move involves $75 million in restructuring costs, some 70 redundancies and the closure of its Bawal plant, walking away from a market worth about 17 million bike and scooter sales a year. It will retain only a scaled-down sales office in Gurgaon. “As part of The Rewire, an overhaul of its operating model and market structure, the company is changing its business model in India and evaluating options to continue to serve its customers,” a press release said. he Harley-Davidson dealer network will continue to serve customers through the contract term. “The present contract term is till December,” said Adarsh Tulsyan, proprietor of the sole Harley Davidson dealership in Calcutta.  The company has a total of 33 dealerships in ...

 Hindustan Times Sep 25, 2020 Prasun Sonwalkar A study to analyse the structure of the coronavirus from two waves of infections in a major city found that a more contagious strain dominates recent samples, researchers from Houston Methodist Hospital said on Wednesday. They studied over 5,000 genomes from viruses found in the earliest phase of the pandemic in Houston and from an ongoing, more recent wave of infections. The study, which has not yet been reviewed by outside experts, found that nearly all strains in the second wave had a mutation, known as D614G, which has been shown to increase the number of “spikes” on the crown-shaped virus. The researchers said patients infected with the variant strain had higher amounts of the virus on initial diagnosis. But there was little evidence mutations in the virus have made it deadlier. Meanwhile in the UK, chancellor Rishi Sunak on Thursday announced another multi-billion-pound package that includes the exchequer picking up parts of the ...

 The Indian Express Sep 25, 2020 Harikishan Sharma Citing the opinion of the Attorney General of India, Finance Minister  Nirmala Sitharaman  told Parliament last week that there was no provision in the law to compensate states for loss of GST revenue out of the Consolidated Fund of India (CFI). However, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India has found that the government itself violated the law by retaining Rs 47,272 crore of GST compensation cess in the CFI during 2017-18 and 2018-19, and used the money for other purposes, which “led to overstatement of revenue receipts and understatement of fiscal deficit for the year”. “Audit examination of information in Statements 8, 9 and 13 with regard to collection of the cess and its transfer to the GST Compensation Cess Fund, shows that there was short crediting to the Fund of the GST Compensation Cess collections totalling to Rs 47,272 crore during 2017-18 and 2018-19,” the CAG has said. “The short-crediting was a ...

 The Hindu  Sep 25, 2020 AP A Chinese pharmaceutical company said on Thursday the coronavirus vaccine it is developing should be ready by early 2021 for distribution worldwide, including the United States. Yin Weidong, the CEO of SinoVac, vowed to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to sell CoronaVac in the United States if it passes its third and final round of testing in humans. Mr. Yin said he personally has been given the experimental vaccine. “At the very beginning, our strategy was designed for China and for Wuhan. Soon after that in June and July we adjusted our strategy, that is to face the world,” Mr. Yin said, referring to the Chinese city were the virus first emerged. “Our goal is to provide the vaccine to the world including the U.S., EU and others,” Mr. Yin said. Stringent regulations in the U.S., European Union, Japan and Australia have historically blocked the sale of Chinese vaccines. But Mr. Yin said that could change. SinoVac is developing one of C...

 The Hindustan times Sep 25, 2020 Tarush Bhalla India’s online grocery market has emerged as the new battleground for BigBasket, Flipkart, Reliance JioMart, Swiggy and Amazon India. With customers preferring to stay indoors, companies are battling to grab a larger slice of this online grocery business that is estimated to expand ninefold to $18.2 billion by 2024, according to a new report from RedSeer. In the short-term, the size of the e-grocery market in the country is expected to expand from $1.9 billion in 2019 to $3 billion by the year-end and then grow at an annual pace of 57% for the next four years, the report said. Online sales contribute to a minuscule 0.3% of the overall grocery sales in India and are expected to increase to 2.3% by 2024, RedSeer said. Almost every food delivery and e-commerce firm pivoted to selling groceries because of the restrictions on the delivery of non-essentials during lockdown. With customers left with no option but to look at digital channels ...

 The Hinduatan Times Sep 24, 2020 Rezual H Laskar Cross-border terror, blocking connectivity and obstructing trade are the key challenges that the  South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc)   must overcome to ensure lasting peace and security in the region, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said on Thursday. Jaishankar made the remarks while addressing an informal virtual meeting of foreign ministers of the eight-member grouping, whose functioning has stalled because of differences between India and Pakistan. The meeting of the foreign ministers is an annual event held on the margins of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York that has been marked by testy exchanges between India and Pakistan in recent years. “Cross-border terrorism, blocking connectivity and obstructing trade are three key challenges that SAARC must overcome,” Jaishankar said in a string of tweets highlighting the contents of his speech. “Only then will we see enduring peace, prospe...

 The Indian Express Sep 25, 2020 Anirudh Suri It is a strange phenomenon when two of Asia’s largest economies decide that in the midst of one of the worst pandemics the world has ever seen, they want to raise the stakes in a decades-long border dispute. What is really going on, one might ask. Is there a war brewing between India and China? The skirmishes on the Ladakh border might suggest that long-standing territorial issues are at the core of the conflict. But there is another possible explanation. A larger conflict is brewing, almost eerily along the lines of the conflict between China and the US. And the dominance of global technology platforms and networks is likely at the centre of it. Various policy measures announced by the government in recent months — all coinciding exactly with skirmishes on the Ladakh front — have specifically targeted Chinese-origin technology players. Suddenly, China seems to have lost its mantle as the master of the Indian technology sector’s destiny...

 The Indian Express Sep 25, 2020 Shyamlal Yadav FROM PUBLIC sector giants Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and State Trading Corporation to private majors Bharti Airtel and Essar, several entities, because they are under scrutiny by Indian investigative agencies, have been red-flagged in Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by banks with the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), records investigated by  The Indian Express  show. * Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL):  As many as 607 transactions ($14.9 million) in 2014 of HAL were red-flagged by Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas (DBTCA) —38 of these ($4.07 million) with US-based Honeywell International and 13 ($2.1 million) with Israel-based Elbit Systems, both in the aviation and defence sectors. The SAR alleged that although details indicated payments for “agency commission,” “training”, “tender”, and “customer support program’”, no “information regarding the commercial purpose…was found”. Another r...

 The Economic Times Sep 24, 2020 India on Thursday hit out at Pakistan for raising the Kashmir issues at a virtual meeting of multilateral grouping CICA, and advised Islamabad to cease its "overt and covert" support to cross-border terrorism. In a sharp reaction, the Ministry of External Affairs said Pakistan has misused another forum by continuing its "spurious narrative" about India. Pakistan raised the Kashmir issue at the ministerial meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence  Building Measures in Asia (CICA), an intergovernmental forum of 27 countries. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar represented India at the meeting. The MEA said Pakistan has no locus standi to comment on internal affairs of India, asserting that the Union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh have been and will remain an integral part of the country. "Pakistan's remarks today constitute gross interference in India's internal affairs, sovereignty and  terr...

The Indian Express Sep 25, 2020 Last week, the Supreme Court  came down heavily on a TV channel  that was intent on broadcasting hate-filled programmes. The Court underlined the need for laying down clear guidelines, and their effective implementation, for the media against hate speech. This has brought to the centre-stage, once again, the debate about the need, scope and extent of media regulation. TV channels have the power to set the country afire with their hateful discourse, for which some of them have become notorious. In his  opinion piece,   S Y Quraishi , former Chief Election Commissioner of India and a former member of National Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA), explains the possible forms of such regulation. They are government regulation, self-regulation and independent regulation. The government has made several attempts in the past to regulate the media but all such attempts came crashing down in the wake of public outcry. Government regulations ...