South African life insurer Liberty Group has launched a takeover bid for investment holding firm Capital Alliance, offering Rand 3.1 billion, or 17.50 rand per share. Liberty Group, which is also known as Liberty Life, says it can pay for
Bank of New York is in talks with Federal prosecutors about paying a $24 million penalty in order avoid a criminal indictment on charges of failing to report suspicious activity at a branch, according to a report in the Wall
J.P. Morgan Chase could be cutting as much as 5% of their total European investment banking headcount. Reuters is reporting the jobs cuts are part of an end of year business review. The bank employs about 6,000 investment bank staff
BrokerTec has delayed going live with the release of settlement instructions to the Bank of Greece from 13 December to the beginning of 2005. "The main reason behind this delay is testing issues and client documentation not being in place,"
Fidelity Investments is broadening its defined contribution (DC) product range in the UK by adding a Group Stakeholder product from the beginning of December. The increasing trend towards DC arrangements in the UK is well documented, says Fidelity. Its Group
SEB is offering clients tax relief at source for certain clients in Finland and on some Finnish securities that are held with SEB in Sweden. Relief at source can only be applied if there is a Double Taxation Agreement between
Latin America's ever escalating violent crime rates are driving foreign investors to the less blood thirsty investment centers of Asia. Crime such as murder and kidnapping in Latin America is forcing up the costs of doing business in the region
The Norwegian Parliament has approved new tax legislation, backdated to 1 January 2004, which exempts from Norwegian withholding tax dividend payments made to EU and EEA corporate shareholders. Private individuals and corporate shareholders outside EU and EEA do not qualify
The final proposal regarding the expected abolition of dividend taxation has been passed by Croatian Government to the Croatian Parliament for approval. The cornerstone of the proposal calls for as of January 1st, 2005, the dividend income, irrespective of the
On November 22nd 2004 HVB Hungary's Custody Division successfully transitioned from OMNI IC to Bank Austria Custody System (BA CS). The introduction of the BA CS is the next step in HVB BACA's Group wide "Service Harmonisation Project". This is