Headlines

Wen Jiabao, China's premier, has pledged $10 billion in new low-cost loans to Africa over the next three years and has defended his country's engagement on the continent against accusations that it is "plundering" the region's oil and minerals, The Washington Post reported. Wen made the pledge Sunday at a China-Africa summit here, at which he also urged the United States to keep its deficit to an "appropriate size" to ensure the "basic stability" of the dollar. The loan pledge for Africa was double a $5 billion commitment made in 2006.

A team of General Motors Co. executives will arrive in Germany on Monday to fine-tune a restructuring plan for Adam Opel GmbH and search out a new leader for the European unit, company officials said. The U.S. auto maker said Friday that Carl-Peter Forster, who worked for GM for more than nine years, is quitting as chief executive of GM Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. The decision follows a vote by the company's board of directors on Tuesday to scrap a plan to sell control of the German Opel unit to Magna International Inc. and Russia's Sberbank.

European carmaker Opel needs to be able to operate with more freedom from its U.S. parent General Motors, a top executive at spurned suitor Magna said in a newspaper interview on Sunday. "Opel should have a greater independence and autonomy in the future, but it should also not stand isolated," Magna's head of Europe, Siegfried Wolf, told Bild am Sonntag.

Creditors of companies that go bust in the Emirates are likely to be paid less than in most other Arab countries, creating a deterrent to investment, says a report from the World Bank, The National reported. Policymakers in the country have been urged to focus their efforts on reforming the UAE’s insolvency framework to lay the foundations for a better business environment. Creditors get an average of 10.2 cents (37 fils) in the dollar if a company in the UAE files for bankruptcy, data from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation shows.

Authorities in Britain and Australia have requested information from UBS after the Swiss bank agreed in August to disclose some 4,450 client names to settle a U.S. tax case, the bank confirmed on Sunday, Reuters reported. UBS said in a note to its third-quarter financial statement, published last week, that tax and regulatory authorities in a number of jurisdictions had requested information on cross-border wealth management services provided by UBS and other banks.

The closure of four schools in Australia has left at least 400 Chinese students high and dry, prompting China's consulate in Sydney to caution against studying in the land down under, China Daily reported. Meridian International was one of four schools under the Global Campus Management Group in Sydney and Melbourne to be closed on Nov 5 after the group failed to repay debts. There were approximately 400 Chinese students at Meridian International, according to China's consulate general in Sydney in a statement over the weekend.

The 28,000 employees at German department store chain Karstadt initially agreed to a plan to reduce wage costs by about €150 million ($223.1 million) over three years to prevent a breakup of the company, Reuters reported. On Saturday, German trade union Verdi said it reached a deal with the administrator of Karstadt, a unit of insolvent retailer Arcandor, that should be formally approved this coming Monday.

South African miner DRDGold would on Tuesday bring a semi-urgent application to the South Gauteng High Court to have its loss-making Blyvooruitzicht gold mine placed under judicial management, the company said on Monday. DRDGold CEO Niel Pretorius told Mining Weekly Online that the application was being made in order to prevent the underground Carletonville gold mine from plunging into liquidation, as occurred this year with the stricken Pamodzi Gold.

U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner clashed over potential taxes on bank transactions at a weekend meeting here of finance policy makers from the Group of 20 leading economies, The Wall Street Journal reported. The U.K.'s Mr. Brown surprised many attendees by throwing his weight behind the idea of levying a tax on financial transactions and using those funds to pay for future bank bailouts. Germany and France reaffirmed their support for such a tax. Mr. Geithner made plain that the U.S. wouldn't support a bank-transaction tax.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged on Sunday to spend more on health care and education and make it easier for foreign investors to take part in India’s $1.2 trillion economy, The New York Times reported. At a World Economic Forum meeting, Mr. Singh said that public sector spending on health care would more than double, to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product, and education spending would increase to 6 percent. The government “should have done a lot more in both areas” in recent years, he said. Under Mr.