Terrorists take more than 20 hostage along Abuja-Kaduna road
Terrorists who have taken a liking to the Abuja-Kaduna road have struck again as they took hostage more than 20 road users on Tuesday evening around 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.
The terrorists, said to be numbering more than 15 and wielding dangerous weapons stuck at the Kurnmin kare and katari area of the road and abducted both private and commercial passengers.
It was gathered that prior to this latest attack, there was information that an imminent attack was about to happen following an earlier attack in the town of Katari where more than 16 people were abducted.
This attack represents the third major attack in less than three months in this state. The first was the Abuja-Kaduna train attack, which led to the deaths of 9 people and the abduction of many others, and the second was an attack just recently on the same highway that led to the death of a youth corper.
There has been no official statement from the police authorities or the Kaduna state government about this attack.
Ghana buys gold locally to strengthen cedis
The Governor of the Central Bank of Ghana (CBG) has said that the country’s government has decided to buy gold from the local market so as to increase the gold component of its reserves.
This move by the monetary authority of the country was carried out as a way to not only protect and improve confidence in the domestic currency, the cedis, but also as a way to fight the growing inflation rate, which, according to tradingeconomics stood at 23.6 percent as of the month of April 2022.
“We have started a bulk purchase program, domestic, where we buy gold locally and try to raise the gold component in our level of reserves. This is where the currency focus is,” Central Bank Governor Ernest Addison said on Tuesday at a conference.
A country of over 25.5 million people and blessed with gold, oil, cocoa, timber, and diamonds is trying seriously, without resorting to the IMF or any other international lender, to deal with its rising food and energy prices amidst growing unemployment.
Saudi Aramco trading unit gets ready for IPO
Following positive reviews and results, Saudi Arabia’s oil giant, Aramco, is considering taking advantage of the rise in crude oil prices to carry out an initial thought-out public offering of its trading arm.
Many analysts believe this will be the largest IPO in history, with an oversubscription of more than 65 percent.
According to information made available to Bloomberg, Aramco Trading Co., which is the trading company for Aramco, is working closely with investment banking giants Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley to guide its preparation for the IPO.
The public offering could fetch in excess of $30 billion, people privy to some sensitive information told Bloomberg.
Aramco, which has already replaced Apple Inc., as the world’s most valuable company, believes that a 30 percent equity sale will outperform South Korea’s LG Energy Solutions, which raised $10.8 billion in January 2022 during its IPO offering.
According to Bloomberg, there are no guarantees that Aramco will proceed with the listing due to the need to “keep secret the nature of their dealings,” as most international oil companies (IOCs) do to avoid undue attention on their activities.
Aramco is also considering listing its refining company, Luberef, which the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia considers a part of its short-term and medium-term move to diversify away from oil.
South Korea launches ‘fact-finding’ investigation into collapse of LUNA and UST
South Korea’s top financial regulators have launched a fact-finding investigation to unravel the mystery behind the sudden collapse of domestic crypto exchange operators LUNA and UST.
With the collapse that shocked the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem and cost billions in lost money to investors and traders, regulators have asked local cryptocurrency exchanges to assist with all valuable information pertaining to transactions and investors of the two coins. Yonhap News reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.
Last week, the prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies suffered a terrible fall, losing nearly 45 percent of their market value following the dramatic shift in the fortunes of the world’s only US pegged stable coin-UST. The US pegged loss sent the price of UST and terra (LUNA) into a free fall, thereby causing the most dramatic financial misfortune event since the 2008 global financial meltdown.
According to information gathered by Bitcoin.com, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), both government top financial regulators tasked with investigating financial transaction anomalies, have requested all intel relating to UST and LUNA.
“Last week, financial authorities asked for data on the amount of transactions and investors and sized up the exchanges’ relevant measures.” A senior official of a crypto exchange operator said.
“I think they did it to draw up measures to minimise the damage to investors in the future,” the exchange official added.
The authorities, which did an excellent professional job in investigating financial misappropriation and recklessness charges against the former South Korean President Park Geun-Hye, demanded files and documents relating to trading volumes, closing prices, and numbers of relevant investors, the publication noted.
Other information requested were the documents and computer files pertaining to countermeasures to the recent crypto market crash and analyses of the cause of the collapse.
Since the collapse of the two cryptocurrencies, which cost millions of dollars in lost investment, founder Kwon Do-Hyung, a South Korean national through his company, Terraform Labs, has made unsuccessful attempts to revive the coin.
News from the Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) said that Kwon’s wife sought police protection after an unidentified man who happened to have lost around $2 million in the LUNA collapse broke into the apartment in South Korea.
Allianz fund collapse ends with guilty plea, $5.8 billion payout
Allianz Fund will plead guilty to fraud charges labelled against it and pay $5.8 billion in compensation after some of its staff wrongfully represented risk taken by a group of hedge funds amid the 2020 coronavirus pandemic-influenced downturn.
The Fund, which is a unit of Allianz SE, has agreed, according to Bloomberg, to “sell the bulk of Allianz Global Investors US” as part of a settlement deal with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
This penalty stands out as one of the biggest in US history and is expected to help regulators, especially the SEC, design better laws that can protect depositors’ money.
The fund’s initial goal was to provide protection against market crashes by incorporating many algorithms of computation that they believed were crash-proof. Unfortunately, the funds crashed following the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in a loss of $7 billion that led to several lawsuits.
One of the alleged culprits, Gregoire Tournant, the former chief investment officer and co-lead portfolio manager of the funds, was arrested in Colorado and separately charged with fraud. His lawyers said he will fight the charges. This is according to Bloomberg.
A source said that the other two accused people are currently cooperating with the authorities and would help with the investigation.
This guilty plea by Allianz Fund follows a similar plea by a unit of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which pleaded guilty in 2020 for its role in the 1MDB scandal.
Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Tournant “traded on AGI’s reputation for careful risk management to put investors at ease” and AGI’s “control environment was riddled with holes,”
In addition to the $5.8 billion fines and compensation to the Justice Department, the company agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle claims by the SEC, including a $675 million civil penalty that the former New Jersey Attorney General, Gurbir Grewal, called one of the commission’s biggest since Enron and WorldCom.
“We accept our corporate responsibility for the isolated but serious wrongdoing of these three former employees in the previously dissolved US Structured Products Group,” AGI spokesperson John Wallace said in a statement. “In particular, it has been important to Allianz and AllianzGI to reach fair settlements with those clients who were misled and lied to by these individuals, and to support the US authorities in their pursuit of justice.”
