Lebanon’s independents disrupt political order
Highlights:
– The phone has not stopped ringing since political novice Ibrahim Mneimneh won a seat in Lebanon’s parliamentary election this month.
– He is one of 13 new lawmakers with ties to the October 2019 protest movement.
– His win was even more surprising as it came in a Beirut district where establishment parties have dominated for the past 30 years.
– Najat Aoun Saliba, a chemistry professor and environmental activist who was among those elected last week, credits the blast for her decision to run.
– Saliba is one of four women in the new cohort of independents and one of eight overall female MPs in the new parliament, a record number for Lebanon.
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UAE Chemicals Firm Borouge Seeks to Raise $2 Billion From IPO – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– Seven cornerstone investors have agreed to subscribe for $570 million worth of shares. The family of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, Asia’s richest man, has committed $75 million, Abu Dhabi wealth fund ADQ will buy shares worth $120 million and Alpha Dhabi Holding has committed $100 million.
– Founded in the late 1990s, Borouge makes plastics used in everything from automobiles and food packaging to medicine vials and piping systems. Its main plant is in Abu Dhabi.
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First Middle East Spac lists in Abu Dhabi
Highlights:
– ADC Acquisition Corporation, backed by the oil-rich emirate’s government, is the latest in a string of blank-cheque companies from the region as liquidity surges thanks to sky-high oil prices.
– ADC was established by ADQ and Chimera Investment, a unit of the private Royal Group, which is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
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PIF’s total assets in 22 local companies amount to $228.26bln after acquiring stake in KHC — www.zawya.com
Highlights:
– KHC founder Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal signed an agreement with the PIF to sell 625 million shares, representing 16.87 percent of the company’s share capital. By this, the market value of PIF’s shares in KHC reached about SR6.24 billion.
– The PIF had earlier acquired about four percent of the Saudi Aramco shares, and its current market value is about SR313.6 billion
– The PIF owns 67.18 percent of the shares of the Saudi Telecom Co. (STC) with a value of SR141.89 billion. STC was followed by SNB (Al Ahli Bank) with a value of SR113.39 billion regarding the PIF stake.
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$UST $USDT Terra Collapse Triggers $83 Billion Decentralized Finance Slump – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– The total value locked across all major protocols has slumped to $112 billion from $195 billion at the start of the month, data from industry tracker DeFi Llama show.
– Bitcoin and Ether, the two largest tokens, tumbled below key support levels earlier this month and have struggled to break above them since, caught just below $30,000 and $2,000 respectively.
– MakerDAO, the largest DeFi project by total value staked, has seen its total value locked drop by almost a third over the past month, to $9.8 billion, DeFi Llama data show. Curve, a popular platform for swapping stablecoins, has suffered a more than 55% plunge, to $9 billion.
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Xi Jinping May Not Get a Third Term? George Soros Thinks So. Here Are the Odds – Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com
Highlights:
– At this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Soros made his most sensational claim yet — that Xi may not get re-elected to a third term at the 20th National Congress this fall.
– Soros is not alone in thinking that Xi may be losing his grip on power.
– Speculation is rife that there’s a power struggle going on and possibly even gridlock among the political elite.
– is China’s most powerful politician in decades. In 2018, he managed to remove the two-term limit on the presidency, thereby paving the way for a third term this fall.
– The Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy depends on its ability to deliver economic prosperity — and that’s now a stumbling block.
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Stressed-Out Supply Chain Managers Are Throwing in the Towel – Bloomberg
Highlights:
– LinkedIn, a division of Microsoft Corp., calculates turnover by analyzing member profiles to determine the number of people who left their jobs each month. The figure is compared with the average for 2016, which LinkedIn calls the “separation rate.” For supply-chain managers, the average separation rate increased by 28% from 2020 to 2021, according to data compiled for Bloomberg.
– The number of openings for supply-chain managers on ZipRecruiter Inc.’s website more than doubled between January 2020 and March of this year.
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