And yet another one bites the dust! According to media reports this morning. An ex-Credit Suisse banker wanted in the United States on fraud charges, has been arrested in London. Kareem Serageldin, the former head of the Swiss bank’s Structured Credit Trading business, has been accused of manipulating the value of certain mortgage securities, during the global financial crisis, to boost his bonus. Why not? The fraud charges involve subprime mortgage bonds worth $3 billion. The SEC said that when the value of those bonds began to decline in late 2007, Mr. Serageldin and his members of his team “abandoned their obligation to accurately record the fair value of their bonds and instead began to price the bonds in a way that allowed them to achieve their goal of showing consistently profitable trading”. When Credit Suisse discovered the wrongly-priced bonds, it reported that the value of them had been overstated by $540m. According to reports, police arrested Serageldin yesterday, outside the US Embassy in London, and he is now facing extradition to the US.
Telecommunications firms Middle East are contemplating the idea of creating a pan-Arab online platform, challenging Facebook and other Internet behemoths of the West. Telecommunications firms are frustrated, as they spend a lot of money building up their networks, but essentially the firms only make money from charging for access to their networks – which is not a very profitable business model. The lion’s share of new revenue from traffic is being taken by so-called “over-the-top” Internet companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter. However, this ambitious project faces technical and financial obstacles and will probably never be implemented on a large scale. But supporters argue the common language and culture shared by the world’s more than 350 million Arabic speakers, plus the webs of affiliated companies which Gulf operators own across the Middle East and North Africa, could make the project viable. Sultan said, the proposed Arab online platform would feature social media and online shopping for goods and services, including digital content such as music, video and applications, Sultan said. He declined to give details, saying parts of the talks were confidential.
Just as we are slowly getting tired of the game app Angry Birds, that very same one that changed our lives and gave us an outlet for all of our frustrations, Angry Birds-maker Rovio Entertainment is on the quest to prove, that it is not a one-hit wonder, by launching Bad Piggies today. The new game will feature pigs which strike back at the birds who attacked them, with slingshots. A hit on app stores would give the Finnish company a boost as it looks to a possible stock market flotation next year. Some analysts put its market value at between $6 billion and $9 billion. The highly-addictive game helped Rovio’s sales jump 10-fold to $100 million last year. It has remained at the top of gaming charts, with more than a billion downloads, and had 200 million monthly users at the end of 2011. Hmmm…I’ll definitely be checking out the Bad Piggie game.
And yet another one bites the dust! According to media reports this morning. An ex-Credit Suisse banker wanted in the United States on fraud charges, has been arrested in London. Kareem Serageldin, the former head of the Swiss bank’s Structured Credit Trading business, has been accused of manipulating the value of certain mortgage securities, during the global financial crisis, to boost his bonus. Why not? The fraud charges involve subprime mortgage bonds worth $3 billion. The SEC said that when the value of those bonds began to decline in late 2007, Mr. Serageldin and his members of his team “abandoned their obligation to accurately record the fair value of their bonds and instead began to price the bonds in a way that allowed them to achieve their goal of showing consistently profitable trading”. When Credit Suisse discovered the wrongly-priced bonds, it reported that the value of them had been overstated by $540m. According to reports, police arrested Serageldin yesterday, outside the US Embassy in London, and he is now facing extradition to the US.
Telecommunications firms Middle East are contemplating the idea of creating a pan-Arab online platform, challenging Facebook and other Internet behemoths of the West. Telecommunications firms are frustrated, as they spend a lot of money building up their networks, but essentially the firms only make money from charging for access to their networks – which is not a very profitable business model. The lion’s share of new revenue from traffic is being taken by so-called “over-the-top” Internet companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter. However, this ambitious project faces technical and financial obstacles and will probably never be implemented on a large scale. But supporters argue the common language and culture shared by the world’s more than 350 million Arabic speakers, plus the webs of affiliated companies which Gulf operators own across the Middle East and North Africa, could make the project viable. Sultan said, the proposed Arab online platform would feature social media and online shopping for goods and services, including digital content such as music, video and applications, Sultan said. He declined to give details, saying parts of the talks were confidential.
Just as we are slowly getting tired of the game app Angry Birds, that very same one that changed our lives and gave us an outlet for all of our frustrations, Angry Birds-maker Rovio Entertainment is on the quest to prove, that it is not a one-hit wonder, by launching Bad Piggies today. The new game will feature pigs which strike back at the birds who attacked them, with slingshots. A hit on app stores would give the Finnish company a boost as it looks to a possible stock market flotation next year. Some analysts put its market value at between $6 billion and $9 billion. The highly-addictive game helped Rovio’s sales jump 10-fold to $100 million last year. It has remained at the top of gaming charts, with more than a billion downloads, and had 200 million monthly users at the end of 2011. Hmmm…I’ll definitely be checking out the Bad Piggie game.