By Dominic Culverwell in Kyiv Another wave of Iranian-made Kamikaze drone struck on Kyiv and Southern Ukraine in the morning of October 17 killing at least three people and injuring dozens, as Russia’s relentless bombing of Ukraine’s infrastructure con…
Flow of FDI to Romania reversed in August as Romgaz takes over Neptun Deep participation
By bne IntelliNews Romgaz completing the takeover of the Bahamas-registered ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Romania Limited for nearly €1bn in August reversed the direction of net FDI and made Romania a net foreign investor as the FDI outflows su…
Interior minister says Serbia ‘doesn’t belong’ in the EU
By bne IntelliNews Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin has argued that Serbia doesn’t belong in the EU, whose members in any case ‘don’t want’ to admit Serbia. Serbia has been an EU candidate country for more than a decade, since March 2012, and started…
CENTRAL ASIA BLOG: Is the Middle Corridor all it’s cracked up to be?
By Kanat Shaku in Almaty The “Middle Corridor” is all the rage. Industry insiders talk about its exciting potential to transform Central Asia into the essential region for goods transit between China and Europe. It’s not hard to see what all the fuss i…
Russia moots plan for making Turkey a major hub for its gas supplies
By bne IntelliNews Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed establishing Turkey as a hub for delivering gas supplies to the EU, in response to the multiple leaks that have rendered the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines inoperable. The proposal has bee…
Russian investment company Kismet Capital Group acquires 100% of Avito from South Africa’s Naspers Investment holding
The Russian TMT investment company, Kismet Capital Group, announced that it signed off on an agreement to acquire a 100% stake in Avito, the world’s largest online advertisements platform, from South African holding company Naspers. The deal has been v…
Hungarian central bank announces extraordinary measures to halt forint’s slide
By Tamas Csonka in Budapest The Hungarian National Bank (MNB) was forced to introduce a number of emergency measures on October 14 to stabilise the financial markets and to halt the decline of the forint, which has broken record lows several times this…
Belarus Corruption Watch: How the Lukashenko family’s friends in the construction business hide from sanctions
By bne IntelliNews The Serbian brothers Bogoljub and Dragomir Karić have (together with the rest of their family) been running construction businesses throughout the Balkans and post-Soviet countries in the east since 1991. In their latest joint invest…
Internet wipeout used by Iran regime to counter protests shuts 300,000 e-commerce stores
By bne IntelIiNews Iran has seen the closure of around 300,000 e-commerce stores that depend on social media for business as a result of the government’s throttling and disconnecting of the internet during the past month of nationwide protests, Shargh …
Will Ukraine suffer in darkness this winter? DTEK’s Timchenko believes the energy sector can pull through with help from friends
By Dominic Culverwell in Berlin Russia’s extreme strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this week have caused international outrage and concerns that the war-torn country will suffer a cold and dark winter. DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private investor …