Nigeria lost $6.8 billion from 2009 to 2011 due to corrupt and mismanaged practices of its fuel subsidy programme, said a report presented to the Nigerian parliament on Tuesday, with numerous officials from the nation’s state-controlled oil company and other government agencies said to be implicated in the scandal.
“Government officials made nonsense of … guidelines due mainly to sleaze and, in some other cases, incompetence…”
Greece’s Labour Ministry has discovered nearly 200,000 cases of pension or welfare fraud by its citizens, claimed a report by Reuters on Wednesday, with the government expected to save up to 800 million euros ($1 billion) a year from ending these payments.
Credit is the lifeline for small businesses and having a good credit can allow businesses the opportunity to forge better relationships with more than one lender. How can home-businesses owners keep their credit in check?
Owning a home-business is not easy. Entrepreneurship has its problems, and a critical, sometimes fatal, problem is getting the right access to financial resources.
Some of the mistakes home-based businesses make include putting in too much startup debt, via credit cards or other high interest plans.
The Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States are investigating the financial dealings of some of Hollywood’s biggest movie studios in China after information leaked that studio executives may have been making illegal payments to government officials in order to gain a stronger foothold into the Chinese market.
Despite widespread public opposition, the head of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has called on Japan to restart its nuclear plants, provided they are deemed safe to ensure a stable power supply.
Speaking to reporters in Tokyo, OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria urged Japan to resume nuclear electricity generation, given that nuclear power supplied almost a third of the country’s electricity needs before last year’s atomic disaster.
Romanian crime syndicates have been transporting busloads of beggars, pickpockets and prostitutes into London every day for the last three months, said officials from the Westminster Council on Tuesday, as the city prepares for a massive influx of tourists ahead of the upcoming Olympic Games.
Chinese president Hu Jintao has pledged to bolster ties with North Korea, after a meeting with the hermit state’s top envoy. The reaffirmation of friendship comes amid a huge international outcry over North Korea’s nuclear provocation and recent attempted rocket launch.
Speaking in a meeting with Kim Yong-Il, a top official of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, Hu Jintao called for greater cooperation between the two nations, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Hu was quoted saying:
A senior United Nations official has said that criminality is one of the biggest economies in the world. According to estimations, the crime industry generates 3.6 percent of world GDP, or about $2.1 trillion a year – equivalent to the size of Brazil’s GDP.
Marking the start of a week-long meeting of the International Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned that criminal business is one of the largest economies of the world, and the problem may be growing.
Royal Dutch Shell plc may be liable for more than $150 million in compensation to victims of a 2008 Nigerian oil spill, said a report by The Guardian on Monday, after a Amnesty International-commissioned study discovered that the damage caused had been more than 60 times what the energy company had originally claimed.
Private businesses and tax revenues will soon make up nearly 50 percent of Cuba’s economic activity, said a senior Communist party official over the weekend, as the government attempts to move gradually towards a market socialism model for the economy.
