Category: Economy and Policy

LONDON (Reuters) – Delaying Brexit would extend rather than resolve the uncertainty that is hurting the economy, Britain’s business secretary Greg Clark told a parliament committee on Wednesday.

“Pausing Article 50 would not cure the uncertainty. In fact it would extend the uncertainty,” Clark told members of parliament, referring to the legal mechanism under which Britain is due to leave the European Union on March 29.

SAO PAULO, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Brazil’s Embraer SA and partner firm Sierra Nevada Corp have received an order for 12 A-29 Super Tucano military aircraft from the Nigerian Air Force, a securities filing showed on Wednesday.

The customer will use the airplanes in tactical operations, the filing said.

The planes will be manufactured by Embraer in Jacksonville, Florida, and customized by Sierra Nevada at its Centennial plant in Colorado. (Reporting by Ana Mano; editing by Jason Neely)

LONDON, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Growth in passenger numbers at European airports slowed in 2018 and freight traffic decelerated sharply, airport association ACI Europe said on Wednesday, adding that uncertainty over the global economy and Brexit could hinder numbers this year too.

Passenger growth in Europe slowed to 6.1 percent in 2018 from 8.5 percent in 2017, which had been the quickest growth since 2004.

Freight traffic declined much more sharply, from 8.4 percent growth in 2017 to 1.8 percent last year, with drops in traffic in November and December.

“The trend of decreasing freight traffic is hard to ignore. It reflects weakening economic data and contraction forces at play, not just in Europe but around the world. These will ultimately translate into lower passenger demand,” Olivier Jankovec, Director General of ACI Europe, said.

“Adding to that, volatile oil prices, labour cost pressures and more consolidation should also lead airlines to be more cautious with capacity expansion. So pressures on passenger traffic are likely to come both from the demand and supply sides in 2019.”

Jankovec also said Brexit uncertainty was the “top immediate risk”, with ACI Europe’s figures already showing that British airports were among the weakest for passenger growth.

With less than two months until Britain is due to leave the European Union, Prime Minister Theresa May is yet to clinch a deal that is acceptable to both Brussels and British lawmakers. Britain and the EU have said that planes will keep flying after Brexit, even if Britain leaves without a deal.

Last week Wizz Air said it was seeing a Brexit impact on bookings but said its core central and eastern European markets were outperforming western Europe.

ACI’s figures showed that passenger numbers at Eastern and Southern EU airports grew the most, with passengers from Lithuania’s Vilnius and Slovakia’s Bratislava up 30.9 percent and 18.1 percent respectively.

(Reuters) – Canadian cannabis producer Aphria Inc said on Wednesday it had rejected U.S. cannabis retailer Green Growth Brands Inc’s hostile takeover bid, saying the offer significantly undervalued the company.

“Green Growth Brands is asking Aphria shareholders to accept a substantial discount on their shares, as well as delisting from both the TSX and NYSE, resulting in a vast dilution of their ownership in Aphria” the chairman of Aphria’s independent board Irwin Simon said in a statement.

Green Growth Brands said in January that it would make a second all-stock takeover bid for Aphria Inc, valuing it at about C$2.35 billion ($1.76 billion).

(Reuters) – Spotify Technology SA on Wednesday reported a 30 percent rise in fourth-quarter revenue, as the music streaming company signed up more paid subscribers.

Monthly subscribers, which account for nearly 90 percent of its revenue, rose to 96 million at the end of December, up from 87 million in the prior quarter.

Revenue rose to 1.5 billion euros ($1.71 billion) from 1.15 billion euros a year earlier.

Separately, the company said it will acquire podcast companies Gimlet Media Inc and Anchor, but did not disclose the financial details.

($1 = 0.8779 euros)

RICHMOND, Va. (Reuters) – Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, facing nearly universal calls from fellow Democrats for his resignation over a racist photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook, stayed hunkered down in the state capital while lawmakers pressed ahead with efforts to pass a budget.

As the scandal surrounding Northam dragged into a sixth day on Wednesday, the political future of the former U.S. Army physician and his next move remained open questions, despite formidable opposition mounting against him.

The 59-year-old governor, who took office a year ago, came under fire on Friday when a conservative media website released a photo from Northam’s personal yearbook page showing one man in blackface makeup standing beside a masked individual garbed in white robes of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan.

Northam, who is white, initially apologized and conceded he was one of the two people in the photo. But he changed his story a day later, saying neither figure in the picture was him and acknowledging he had dressed in blackface once before to portray pop star Michael Jackson.

The origins of blackface date to 19th-century “minstrel” shows in which white performers covered their faces in black grease paint to caricature slaves.

Revelation of the yearbook photo, and the governor’s response to it, drew a chorus of demands for his resignation from civil rights groups and Virginia politicians, including most in his own party, as well as from several Democratic presidential candidates.

Democrats fear that if he stays in office, Republicans in Virginia – a key swing state in the 2020 White House race – would seize on the yearbook scandal to try to turn the election there into a referendum on Northam.

Since his news conference on Saturday to publicly address the furor, Northam’s office has said nothing about his plans, and he has remained out of public view.

With no fanfare on Tuesday, he privately signed high-profile legislation to provide $750 million in cash incentives to Amazon.com Inc in return for the online retailer’s promise to create 38,000 new jobs in Virginia.

Legislators in both parties likewise had little to say on Northam’s predicament on Tuesday.

“It’s a distraction,” Republican state Senator Charles “Bill” Carrico said, adding, “I’m here to do a job.”

Carrico said he and fellow lawmakers were focused mostly on trying to reach a deal on revisions Northam proposed to the state’s $2.1 billion biennial budget before a Feb. 23 deadline.

Meanwhile, Northam’s political heir apparent, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, 39, confronted a potential scandal of his own.

Fairfax on Monday denied a sexual assault allegation that was reported against him on the same website that first disclosed the Northam yearbook photo.

The Big League Politics site posted a private Facebook message on Sunday purportedly obtained from the accuser with her permission by a friend suggesting that Fairfax had assaulted her during the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Fairfax on Monday acknowledged a consensual encounter with the woman in 2004 but said the story of an assault was “totally fabricated.”

Fairfax has been non-committal on Northam’s future, saying it was up to the governor to decide his next move.

Should Northam resign, Fairfax would succeed him to become the second African-American governor in the history of Virginia, where his great-great-great grandfather was a slave. The first was Douglas Wilder, a Democrat elected in 1989.

LONDON (Reuters) – Hackers working on behalf of Chinese intelligence breached the network of Norwegian software firm Visma to steal secrets from its clients, cyber security researchers said, in what a company executive described as a potentially catastrophic attack.

The attack was part of what Western countries said in December is a global hacking campaign by China’s Ministry of State Security to steal intellectual property and corporate secrets, according to investigators at cyber security firm Recorded Future.

China’s Ministry of State Security has no publicly available contacts. The foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment, but Beijing has repeatedly denied any involvement in cyber-enabled spying.

Visma took the decision to talk publicly about the breach to raise industry awareness about the hacking campaign, which is known as Cloudhopper and targets technology service and software providers in order reach their clients.

Cyber security firms and Western governments have warned about Cloudhopper several times since 2017 but have not disclosed the identities of the companies affected.

Reuters reported in December that Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co and IBM were two of the campaign’s victims, and Western officials caution in private that there are many more.

At the time IBM said it had no evidence sensitive corporate data had been compromised, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it could not comment on the Cloudhopper campaign.

Visma, which reported global revenues of $1.3 billion last year, provides business software products to more than 900,000 companies across Scandinavia and parts of Europe.

The company’s operations and security manager, Espen Johansen, said the attack was detected shortly after the hackers accessed Visma’s systems and he was confident no client networks were accessed.

“PARANOIA HAT”

“But if I put on my paranoia hat, this could have been catastrophic,” he said. “If you are a big intelligence agency somewhere in the world and you want to harvest as much information as possible, you of course go for the convergence points, it’s a given fact.”

“I’m aware that we do have clients which are very interesting for nation states,” he said, declining to name any specific customers.

Paul Chichester, director for operations at Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, said the Visma case highlighted the dangers organizations increasingly face from cyber attacks on their supply chains.

“Because organizations are focused on improving their own cyber security, we are seeing an increase in activity targeting supply chains as actors try to find other ways in,” he said.

In a report here with investigators at cyber security firm Rapid7, Recorded Future said the attackers first accessed Visma’s network by using a stolen set of login credentials and were operating as part of a hacking group known as APT 10, which Western officials say is behind the Cloudhopper campaign.

The U.S. Department of Justice in December charged two alleged members of APT 10 with hacking U.S. government agencies and dozens of businesses around the world on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security.

Priscilla Moriuchi, director of strategic threat development at Recorded Future and a former intelligence officer at the U.S. National Security Agency, said the hackers’ activity inside Visma’s network suggested they intended to infiltrate client systems in search of commercially-sensitive information.

“We believe that APT 10 in this case exploited Visma networks to enable secondary operations against Visma’s customers, not necessarily to steal Visma’s own intellectual property,” she said. “Because they caught it so early they were able to discourage and prevent those secondary attacks.”

ZURICH, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Siemens said it regretted the European Commission’s decision to block the merger of its rail business with France’s Alstom and would now assess “all options” for the future of its own train operations.

“We take note of a decision that has brought an end to a European landmark transaction,” Siemens Chief Executive Joe Kaeser said in a statement.

“While not unexpected, it proves that Europe urgently needs structural reform in the way it shapes its industrial future in a globally connected world,” he added. (Reporting by John Revill; Editing by Michael Shields)

LONDON (Reuters) – Delaying Brexit would extend rather than resolve the uncertainty that is hurting the economy, Britain’s business secretary Greg Clark told a parliament committee on Wednesday.

“Pausing Article 50 would not cure the uncertainty. In fact it would extend the uncertainty,” Clark told members of parliament, referring to the legal mechanism under which Britain is due to leave the European Union on March 29.

BRUSSELS, Feb 6 (Reuters) – EU antitrust regulators vetoed on Wednesday Siemens and Alstom’s plan to create a European rail champion, saying that the combined merged company would have hurt competition and led to price hikes in signalling systems.

The European Commission also blocked a bid by German copper company Wieland-Werke AG to buy a business unit from Aurubis , Europe’s biggest copper smelter, because it could have reduced competition and pushed up consumer prices.

“Without sufficient remedies, this merger would have resulted in higher prices for the signalling systems that keep passengers safe and for the next generations of very high-speed trains,” European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said.

She said the companies were not willing adequately to address the regulator’s serious competition concerns. (Reporting by Foo Yun Chee)