Ahad, 2 Disember 2012

NST Online Business Times : latest

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Kenanga cuts target price for Felda Global

Posted: 02 Dec 2012 05:59 PM PST

Kenanga Research has lowered its target price for Felda Global Ventures Holdings Bhd, the world's third largest oil palm planter, to RM4.40 from RM4.65 after reporting lower-than-expected earnings for the first nine months of the year.

The company registered a core net profit of RM621 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30, meeting Kenanga's forecast of 916 million by 68 per cent, the brokerage said in a report on Monday.

"This could be caused by its slower than expected recovery from tree stress, due to its mature estates which have an average tree age of 16.5 years," said Kenanga. It maintained a 'market perform' call for the company.

Felda Global made headlines with a 3.1 billion listing in June, at the time the second largest globally after Facebook's IPO, earmarking funds from the exercise for expansion in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Shares of the company fell 0.22 per cent to RM4.54 as of 0928 am (0128GMT). This continues a downtrend for the stock, which has lost 15.7 per cent since its debut in June. -- Reuters

Najib targets two-thirds majority

Posted: 02 Dec 2012 06:09 PM PST

Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak signaled his party has recovered from its 2008 election setback and said the ruling coalition will be aiming to restore its two- thirds parliamentary majority when elections are held soon.

"We will be going to the battlefield not too long from now," said Najib, speaking at the close of the United Malays National Organisation's annual assembly in Kuala Lumpur at the weekend. "We will have to fight the war and that means we must make sure our team is strong and united."

The prime minister must dissolve parliament for new polls by April 28. In the last election in 2008, the opposition alliance, led by Anwar Ibrahim, secured enough seats to deny the governing National Front coalition a two-thirds majority which it had held for four decades. The opposition won five out of 13 states, though it has since lost one after several lawmakers defected to become independents.

Najib, 59, cut income taxes, boosted pay for government workers and extended handouts for the poor in his 2013 budget announced in September. While the global economy has slowed, Malaysia has maintained gross domestic product growth above 5 per cent for the past five quarters and its benchmark stock index closed at a record last month.

"Najib's tone is more confident because the general assembly is a setting where you'll have to rally the troops before the election," said Ong Kian Ming, a political analyst at UCSI University in Kuala Lumpur, who recently joined the opposition Democratic Action Party. "There's no actual political reason for him to be more confident."

Election Target

Najib's party, which backs policies favoring Malays, has sought to boost its appeal among ethnic Chinese and Indian voters who have shifted their support to opposition parties in recent years.

The National Front has revised its election target and is now aiming to regain its two-thirds majority, a local newspaper reported yesterday, citing Najib. The prime minister told journalists in March that winning a clear majority would be "challenging."

The National Front coalition, known locally as Barisan Nasional, controls 137 seats in Malaysia's 222-member parliament, with Najib's UMNO its biggest component. Anwar Ibrahim's three-party opposition known as the People's Alliance holds 75 seats.

Najib, UMNO's president, started an economic transformation program two years ago which has so far attracted RM212 billion (US$70 billion) of investment commitments, according to the government's Performance Management and Development Unit, or Pemandu. This includes a mass railway in Kuala Lumpur and oil storage and petrochemicals hub in southern state of Johor.

2020 Vision

The initiative, aimed at drawing US$444 billion of private sector-led investments by 2020, is intended to help the Southeast Asian country fulfill its long-term goal of achieving developed nation status by the end of this decade. This should continue irrespective of who wins the next election, said Idris Jala, Pemandu's chief executive officer.

"There was overwhelming response from the public that these are good things for the country," Jala, also a minister in the Prime Minister's Department, said in a Nov. 29 interview. "Whether the new government remains the Barisan Nasional or is new, I believe both of them will favorably look at the economic transformation program."

Najib's approval rating fell one percentage point to 64 per cent in June from a month earlier, according to a survey by the Merdeka Center for Opinion Research. The poll, the latest available, showed 66 per cent of Chinese and 47 per cent of Indians dissatisfied or angry with the government's performance.

The support shown by party members at this week's UMNO assembly indicates that it has recovered from the last general election, Bernama reported Nov. 28, citing the prime minister.

Najib's party and the ruling coalition have faced several corruption scandals that have tainted its image over the past year. Malaysia ranked 60th out of 183 nations last year in Transparency International's corruption perceptions index, four places lower than in 2010, when 178 countries were included. -- Bloomberg

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Egypt's top court suspends work indefinitely amid protest - Fox News

Posted: 02 Dec 2012 08:19 AM PST

Dec. 2, 2012: Riot police form a cordon as several thousand supporters of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi surround the Supreme Constitutional Court on Sunday.AP

CAIRO – Egypt's top court suspended its work indefinitely to protest "psychological and physical pressures" after supporters of the Islamist president prevented judges from entering the courthouse Sunday to rule on the legitimacy of a disputed constitutional assembly.

The decision by the Supreme Constitutional Court is the latest twist in a worsening political crisis pitting President Mohammed Morsi and his allies against the mostly secular opposition and the powerful judiciary. The standoff began when Morsi issued decrees on Nov. 22 that gave him sweeping powers and granted the president -- and the constitutional committee -- immunity from the courts.

The Islamist-dominated panel drafting the new constitution then raced in a marathon session last week to vote on the charter's 236 clauses without the participation of liberal and Christian members. The fast-track hearing preempted a decision expected from the SCC on whether to dissolve the committee. The judges on Sunday postponed their ruling on that case.

A day earlier, Morsi announced a referendum on the draft charter on Dec. 15 despite opposition protests and questions about the document's legitimacy.

The president's seizure of vast powers has galvanized Egypt's disparate opposition groups, who have united in their demands that Morsi rescind the decrees and create a constituent assembly that is more balanced and inclusive.

Having already held mass rallies last week in Cairo that drew as many as 200,000 people, the opposition parties and activist groups have now called for a march Tuesday on the presidential palace in Cairo's Heliopolis district as a "last warning."

Morsi's supporters countered the opposition rallies with a 100,000-strong rally in Cairo on Saturday to voice their support for the president and the draft constitution. Islamists boasted their turnout showed that the public supports the push by the country's first freely elected president to quickly bring a constitution and provide stability after nearly two years of turmoil.

But the dispute has polarized an already deeply divided Egyptian public, and thrown the country -- already suffering from rising crime and economic woes -- into its worst turmoil since Morsi took office in June as the country's first freely elected president.

The Supreme Constitutional Court called Sunday "the Egyptian judiciary's blackest day on record," describing the scene outside the court complex, with Islamist demonstrators carrying banners denouncing the tribunal and some of its judges.

Supporters of Morsi, who hails from the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, claim that the court's judges are loyalists of ousted president Hosni Mubarak, who appointed them. Morsi's backers accuse the judges of trying to derail Egypt's transition to democratic rule.

The court statement said the judges approached the court but decided against entering the building because they feared for their safety.

"The judges of the Supreme Constitutional Court were left with no choice but to announce to the glorious people of Egypt that they cannot carry out their sacred mission in this charged atmosphere," said the statement, which was carried by the MENA state news agency.

The judges also had been expected Sunday to rule to on the legitimacy of the Islamist-dominated upper house of parliament, known as the Shura Council.

By suspending its work, the court joined the country's highest appeals court and its sister lower court in their indefinite strike to protest what they see as Morsi's infringement on the judiciary. Most judges and prosecutors in the country have been on strike for a week.

The strikes by the judges is indefinite and there have been calls within their ranks to extend their action to a boycott of overseeing the Dec. 15 referendum, something that would further question the legitimacy of the entire process. The opposition is likely to call on its supporters to boycott the vote.

The tug of war between the two sides also has spilled into the streets. Tens of thousands of opposition supporters staged two rallies last week to press calls for Morsi to rescind his decrees and for the constitution draft to be tossed out. Islamists responded Saturday with large rallies in Cairo and across much of the country.

Morsi's opponents say his call for a referendum broke an election promise not to do so unless there was consensus on the document, something that is missing as the 88 members of the panel who voted on its clauses included no liberals or Christians. There were only four women, all Islamists.

The panel passed the document in a rushed, 16-hour session that lasted until sunrise Friday. The vote was abruptly moved up to pass the draft before the Constitutional Court's ruling, which was supposed to be issued Sunday.

The draft has a distinctive Islamic bent -- enough to worry many that civil liberties could be restricted, though its provisions for enforcing Shariah, or Islamic law, are not as firm as ultraconservatives wished.

The panel's chairman, Islamist Hossam al-Ghiryani, kept the voting at a rapid clip, badgering members to drop disputes and objections and move on. At times the process appeared slap-dash, with fixes to missing phrasing and even several entirely new articles proposed, written and voted on in the hours just before sunrise.

Geithner: No Social Security talks now - USA TODAY

Posted: 02 Dec 2012 08:36 AM PST

11:39AM EST December 2. 2012 - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner echoed another White House message to Republicans during a string of Sunday show interviews: No Social Security talks as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations.

"We're prepared to, in a separate process, look at how to strengthen Social Security," Geithner said on ABC's This Week. "But not as part of a process to reduce the other deficits the country faces."

White House spokesman Jay Carney and many congressional Democrats have also said that Social Security should be off the table as the fiscal cliff looms.

Republicans say the rise of entitlement spending overall -- Medicare and Medicaid, as well as Social Security -- should be part of any debt reduction agreement now; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other Republicans say the White House is more interested in tax hikes than meaningful spending cuts.

"Their answer to everything on the spending cut/entitlement reform side of the equation is 'maybe later--but tax everything else now,'" said McConnell spokesman Don Stewart.

If the parties are unable to reach an agreement by Jan. 1, they face the so-called "fiscal cliff," a series of automatic tax hikes and budget cuts that could plunge the nation back into recession.

As we reported earlier this morning, Geithner also said the White House will insist that any agreement will include higher tax rates on the wealthy.

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Kredit: www.nst.com.my

Ahad, 2 Disember 2012