Month: July 2017

In 28 years in India’s pharmaceuticals sector, Rajiv Desai has never been busier. Most of the last six months on his desk calendar is marked green, indicating visits to the 12 plants of Lupin, India’s No. 2 drugmaker, where Desai is a senior quality control executive. Only one day is red — a day off. That’s what is needed these days to satisfy the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that standards are being met. “In this sector, you’re only as good as your last inspection,” Desai said in his office in suburban Mumbai. Often dubbed “the pharmacy of the world,” India is home to the most FDA-approved plants outside of the United States and supplies about 40 percent of the $70 billion worth of generic drugs sold in the country. Damaged reputation But sanctions and bans have badly damaged India’s reputation and slowed growth in the $16 billion sector. Drug exports fell in the fiscal year ending in March 2017. More than 40 plants have been banned by the FDA for issues ranging from data fraud to hygiene since India’s then-largest drugmaker Ranbaxy was pulled up for serious violations in 2008. Drug companies have spent millions of dollars on training, new equipment and foreign consultants. Yet the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance of the top 20 firms says its members still need at least five more years to get manufacturing standards and data reliability up to scratch. The case of Lupin shows why. In the next few months, the FDA is expected …

Canadian lender Desjardins is considering no longer funding energy pipelines, a spokesman said Saturday, citing concerns about the impact such projects may have on the environment. Desjardins, the largest association of credit unions in North America, Friday temporarily suspended lending for such projects and may make the decision permanent, spokesman Jacques Bouchard told Reuters by telephone. He said the lender would make a final decision in September. Following ING Desjardins, a backer of Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd’s high-profile expansion of its Trans Mountain pipeline, has been evaluating its policy for such lending for months, Bouchard said. If it makes the decision permanent, that would likely mean Desjardins would not help finance other major Canadian pipelines projects, including TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL and Energy East and Enbridge Inc’s Line 3. Such a move would follow that of Dutch lender ING Groep NV, which has a long-standing policy of not funding projects directly related to oil sands, and is the latest sign that pipelines could have a harder time getting funding as banks face increasing pressure to back away. Patrick Bonin, a campaigner with the environmental group Greenpeace, praised Desjardins for temporarily halting pipeline funding, but called on the lender to make it permanent and reconsider its C$145 million ($113 million) commitment to Trans Mountain. Indigenous, environmental groups Desjardins is among 24 financial institutions that agreed to lend money to a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan Canada, majority owned by Kinder Morgan Inc of Houston, according to regulatory filings. A coalition of more …

The G-20 summit of the world’s richest economies wrapped up Saturday against a backdrop of angry protests, and a pledge by leaders to fight protectionism in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy and Brexit. The U.S. leader took center stage at the two-day gathering, and his meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin was the major headline. VOA Europe correspondent Luis Ramirez reports from Hamburg. …

Visiting Poland this week, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to boost exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Central Europe and take on Russia’s stranglehold on energy supplies. “America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier,” Trump told reporters after talks with his Polish counterpart Thursday. Up to now, that supplier has been Russia. It supplied around a third of Europe’s gas demand in 2016, with an even greater share in many of the former Soviet states in Central and Eastern Europe. Watch: US, Russia on Collision Course in Competition for European Gas Market Natural gas and dominance Russian state-owned firm Gazprom shut off pipelines to Ukraine in 2015, depriving Kyiv of a major source of revenue and disrupting supplies to Eastern Europe. “It’s a key pillar of Russian foreign policy: of using gas and energy as a means of asserting dominance over Central Europe,” said Marek Matraszek, founder of the lobby firm CEC Government Relations, who played a major role in the Polish government’s acquisition of U.S.-built F-16 fighter planes. The first shipment of American liquefied natural gas arrived at the port of Swinoujscie on Poland’s Baltic coast last month. The port facility and liquefaction plant were finished in 2015, aimed at diversifying the country’s energy sources and enabling Poland to become a hub supplying imported gas across Central and Eastern Europe. With that in mind, the Three Seas Initiative …

Visiting Poland this week, US President Donald Trump pledged to boost exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Central Europe, challenging Russia’s dominance of the market. Many European countries accuse Moscow of using energy as a political tool. As Henry Ridgwell reports from Warsaw, analysts say the United States and Russia are on a collision course over energy supplies to the region. …

Job creation in the U.S. appears to have picked up speed, with employers adding 222,000 jobs last month. But the unemployment rate ticked higher as more Americans resumed their job search. That’s probably a good thing, according to some economists who say the bigger challenge is how to speed up wage growth. Mil Arcega reports. …

The shortage of housing in California’s Silicon Valley has gotten so severe that Facebook Inc. on Friday proposed taking homebuilding into its own hands for the first time with a plan to construct 1,500 units near its headquarters. The growth of Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other tech companies has strained neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay area that were not prepared for an influx of tens of thousands of workers during the past decade. Home prices and commute times have risen. Tech companies have responded with measures such as internet-equipped buses for employees with long commutes. Facebook has offered at least $10,000 in incentives to workers who move closer to its offices. Those steps, though, have not reduced complaints that tech companies are making communities unaffordable, and they have mostly failed to address the area’s housing shortage. “The problem with Silicon Valley is you don’t have enough supply to keep up with the demand,” said Sam Khater, deputy chief economist at real estate research firm CoreLogic. With Facebook’s construction plan, the company said it wanted to invest in Menlo Park, the city some 45 miles (72 km) south of San Francisco where it moved in 2011. The company said it wants to build a “village” that will also have 1.75 million square feet of office space and 125,000 square feet of retail space. “Part of our vision is to create a neighborhood center that provides long-needed community services,” John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president for global facilities, said in a …

Argentina on Friday banned embattled Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht from bidding on public works projects in the country for 12 months due to investigations of bribes the company paid here and elsewhere.   The announcement published in the government’s official bulletin also cites corruption and money laundering cases in Brazil and other countries that have led to prison sentences, admission of guilt and clemency pleas by company executives.   The company said it was evaluating the decision and would make sure its rights are preserved.   “Odebrecht reiterates that it is committed to collaborating with authorities and that it is already adopting the necessary measures for an honest, ethical and transparent corporate behavior,” a company statement said. Odebrecht is a key focus of the “Operation Car Wash” investigation into a mammoth kickback scheme at Brazil’s state-run oil company — the biggest corruption scandal in that country’s history. The initial investigation was launched in 2014 and has mushroomed into related probes abroad because companies like Odebrecht operated across Latin America. Company executives acknowledged to U.S. prosecutors earlier this year that they paid more than $700 million bribes to officials in 10 Latin American and two African nations in exchange for multi-million-dollar contracts with local governments. About $35 million in bribes were paid in Argentina between 2007 and 2014.   Argentine Justice Minister German Garavano recently traveled to Washington to meet with a prosecutor and share information that can advance the Odebrecht case. But Argentine prosecutors say Argentina lacks a legal mechanism …

London is a hotspot of modern slavery, with workers in hotels, restaurants and on construction sites at particular risk of exploitation, said the head of the Metropolitan police’s anti-slavery unit. Modern slavery cases surged in the first half of this year to about 820 by the end of June, compared to about 1,013 in the whole of 2016, Detective Inspector Phil Brewer told Reuters. The growth in cases is partly due to increased awareness about slavery, and as police and local authorities are now more often considering whether those involved in potential slavery crimes are victims rather than suspects, said Brewer. The Metropolitan police is working closely with charities and frontline workers to ensure victims are more easily identified and helped faster. “Everyone realizes now we’re never going to police our way out of this,” Brewer said in an interview this week. Government departments, local authorities and police are investigating whether people in the construction and hospitality industries are being held against their will, working under threat, for no pay or in dangerous conditions, Brewer said. Some government departments already have systems in place — on health and safety rules and the enforcement of minimum wages, for example — to lead the battle against modern slavery in construction and hospitality, he added. Britain passed tough anti-slavery legislation in 2015, introducing life sentences for traffickers and forcing companies to disclose what they are doing to make sure their supply chains are free from slavery. There are an estimated 13,000 victims of …

A jump in first-quarter trade between China and North Korea was “unexpected” and masks a declining trend, a state-run Chinese newspaper said Friday, after U.S. President Donald Trump denounced China’s trade with its isolated neighbor. Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40 percent in the first quarter, Trump said via Twitter Wednesday, casting doubt on China’s assertion it is working to press North Korea to rein in its nuclear and missile programs. 37.4 percent blip Data released in April by Beijing showed China’s trade with North Korea grew 37.4 percent in the first quarter over the corresponding 2016 period, the Global Times said, adding that subsequent data showed declining trade in April and May. “First quarter data cannot speak for the whole year,” the paper said in an editorial that carried the headline “China-NK Q1 trade data must be read fairly.” “The trade volume for 2017 is unlikely to grow significantly from last year,” it said. Sanctions implemented While the first-quarter rise was “somewhat unexpected,” the newspaper said China had been strictly implementing U.N. sanctions against North Korea, and that a ban on imports of its coal had taken a toll on two-way trade. The newspaper said trade between China and North Korea had declined during the previous three years. China has not imported North Korean coal since it banned imports of the fuel Feb. 18, the General Administration of Customs said in April. The Global Times, published by the official People’s Daily, reiterated that sanctions should not …

South Australia has picked Tesla to install the world’s largest grid-scale battery, which would be paired with a wind farm provided by France’s Neoen, in a major test of the reliability of large-scale renewable energy use. South Australia, the fifth-biggest state with a population of 1.7 million, has raced ahead of the rest of the country in turning to wind power. Its shutdown of coal-fired plants has led to outages across the eastern part of the nation, driving up energy prices. The drawback to South Australia’s heavy reliance on renewables has been an inability to adequately store that energy, leading to vulnerabilities when the wind doesn’t blow. The project is designed to have a storage capacity of 129 megawatt-hours, which is enough to light up 30,000 homes, a Tesla spokesman told Reuters. 100 days or it’s free Under the terms of the agreement, Tesla must deliver the 100-MW battery within 100 days of a contract being signed or it’s free, matching a commitment made by Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in a Twitter post in March. “There will be a lot of people that will look at this, ‘did they get it done within 100 days? Did it work?’” Musk told reporters in South Australia’s capital city of Adelaide. “We are going to make sure it does.” The 100-day deadline will begin within a few weeks, a political source said, after a connectivity agreement is reached between South Australia, Telsa, Neoen and the Australian Energy Market Operator. Musk and …

India-based Infosys, an information technology outsourcing firm, announced Thursday it will hire 2,000 workers over the next four years for a technology hub in North Carolina, the second of four planned hubs in the U.S.   Infosys executives were joined by North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper at a news conference in which they said the hub will be developed in the state’s Research Triangle region. The company expects to hire the first 500 North Carolina workers within two years as part of an overall strategy leading to eventual creation of 10,000 job overall across the four sites. The first was announced for Indiana in May and the other two locations haven’t yet been announced.   Infosys already has more than 1,100 jobs in North Carolina and will begin hiring later this year, company President Ravi Kumar said in the appearance before reporters at North Carolina’s old Capitol Building with Cooper.   Kumar stressed that the jobs created as part of its U.S. expansion would go to American workers. While workers could come to North Carolina from all over the country, Kumar emphasized the company aimed to fill positions in part through recruiting local university graduates and training workers via a customized community college program.   “This was an easy one for us,” Kumar said. “That’s one of the key reasons why we chose North Carolina — there’s such an excellent ecosystem of colleges and schools.”   The jobs will be created in Wake County, which contains Raleigh and parts of …

The main points of market access in a trade deal between the South American Mercosur bloc and the European Union need to be concluded by December, Brazil’s chief negotiator said on Thursday. The EU and Mercosur have committed to a series of negotiations until the end of the year in what both parties say is a last-ditch effort at sealing a deal that has suffered a series of setbacks since talks first began in 1999. “You cannot have an announcement of an agreement if you do not have the big numbers on market access. I cannot say I have finished and not know what the market access for beef and ethanol will be like,” said Ronaldo Costa Filho, Brazil’s chief negotiator in the talks. The EU and Japan on Thursday reached a “political agreement” on a free trade deal, and officials insisted the key snags have been overcome for the deal to go into effect early in 2019. A deal with the EU would be Mercosur’s first large trade deal, though the bloc scheduled talks with other countries. The EU has eyes on access to public contracts, with the market in Brazil alone worth nearly 150 billion euros ($170 billion), though in return Mercosur will want access to EU agricultural markets such as beef and sugar and derivatives such as ethanol. “Ethanol is essential. I cannot go back home and say ‘tough luck,’” Costa-Filho told a press briefing in Brussels. With Britain leaving the European Union and not benefiting from …

U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday signed an order to hold more lease sales and to speed up approving permits to explore for oil and gas on federal land, a process he said got bogged down under former President Barack Obama. The order is the latest move by the administration of President Donald Trump to make it easier to drill and mine on federal land, which Zinke said is a source of income for the government. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management is supposed to take 30 days to review applications for permits to drill, but Zinke said the average time for processing in 2016 was 257 days. “I’m directing the BLM to conduct quarterly lease sales and address these permitting issues,” Zinke said in a statement. “We are also looking at opportunities to bring support to our front line offices who are facing the brunt of this workload.” There were 2,802 permit applications pending as of January 31, with three-quarters of them filed in five field offices in Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and New Mexico. On a call with reporters, Zinke did not say how long this streamlining process would take. “This is not going to be done overnight. What we don’t want is unintended consequences,” he said. Environmental groups criticized the announcement and said that companies have already leased vast amounts of public lands but have held off on drilling because of record-low oil prices. “With historically low gas prices, these companies aren’t using millions of …