Qatar

Frank Asbeck, founder and former CEO of SolarWorld, has teamed up with Qatar to buy two of the insolvent panel maker's factories, sources familiar with the matter said. Qatar was a shareholder in SolarWorld with a stake of 29 percent before its collapse, while Asbeck held 21 percent, Reuters reported. The plants, located in the German states of Saxony and Thuringia, will be taken over by a new investment vehicle called SolarWorld Industries GmbH, which counts Asbeck and the Qatar Foundation as its owners, the sources told Reuters on Tuesday.

Investors in Qatari stocks, bonds and currency forwards were saddled with losses since the country was thrust into the epicenter of an unprecedented spat with its neighbors. The country’s stock market shrank by about $11 billion in value on Tuesday, the most since 2010, after Middle Eastern countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut ties with the Gulf nation, Bloomberg News reported. The country’s most liquid bonds tumbled last week as its sovereign rating was cut and bets against its currency surged.

The warmth Qatar inspires in the west as a highly-rated borrower turns out to be a local phenomenon. In the Gulf its ambitions to be a regional arbiter have made it deeply unpopular. A diplomatic rift with four of the emirate’s closest Arab neighbours threatens the future of both roles, the Financial Times reported. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have severed air, land and sea ties, accusing Qatar of supporting Islamist militants.

Credit cards on the limit, huge bank borrowings and a struggle to repay loans: these are the personal debt problems of some Qataris despite the Gulf state's reputation for fabulous wealth, Reuters reported. Generous government salaries and free healthcare, funded by vast natural gas reserves in a country with only about 300,000 citizens, do not always translate into healthy bank balances for ordinary Qataris.

The Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) has strengthened its insolvency regime to enhance certainty in the financial landscape in a bid to woo more foreign investments, a move that would also see the advent of a new breed of Qatar-based insolvency practitioners. This has been made possible with the QFC Authority (QFCA) amending its insolvency legislation as part of modernising the financial infrastructure of the country.

An Icelandic court sentenced four former Kaupthing bankers to jail yesterday for market abuses related to a large stake taken in the bank by a Qatari sheikh just before it went under in late 2008, Reuters reported yesterday. Weeks before the country's top three banks collapsed under huge debts as the global credit crunch struck, Kaupthing announced that Sheikh Mohammed Bin Khalifa Bin Hamad al Thani had bought 5 percent of its shares in a confidence-boosting move. A parliamentary commission later said that the shares had been bought with a loan from Kaupthing itself.

Debt-laden SolarWorld is close to securing financial backing from a Qatari investor, its chief executive said on Thursday, the second major move in a week in its efforts to get back on its feet. "We will publish the size of the potential stake at the extraordinary general meeting," Frank Asbeck, nicknamed the "sun king" by solar industry media, told Reuters on Thursday, declining to name the investor.

Barclays Plc (BARC) faces a criminal probe into fees it paid in 2008 to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund as the bank sought to raise money to avoid a government bailout, Bloomberg reported. The Serious Fraud Office, which prosecutes bribery and white-collar crime, told the London-based bank it has “commenced an investigation into payments under certain commercial agreements between Barclays and Qatar Holding LLC,” the lender said in a statement today. The investigation is another legal pitfall for Britain’s second-biggest lender by assets after it paid U.S. and U.K.

Spanair SA, the Spanish airline involved in a crash that killed 154 people in 2008, ceased operations after Qatar Airways Ltd. halted takeover talks and the regional government refused to provide further funding, Bloomberg reported. The final flight landed at about 10 p.m. Friday, the Barcelona-based carrier said in an e-mailed statement, citing “a lack of financial visibility for the coming months.” The closer may affect as many as 23,000 passengers this weekend and will see 120 flights canceled, spokeswoman Sandra Melendez said.

Porsche on Thursday fired Wendelin Wiedeking, the high-profile chief executive who rejuvenated the nearly bankrupt sports car maker in the early 1990s but stumbled as a massive debt load torpedoed plans to take over the much larger Volkswagen concern, which will now absorb Porsche itself, The New York Times reported.