SaudiGulf Air to start Pakistan operations

ISLAMABAD: A new full-service national carrier of Saudi Arabia will start its operations in Pakistan from March 1, linking country’s four cities with the eastern province of Dammam, announced SaudiGulf Airlines Chief Commercial Officer Karim Makhlouf on Wednesday.

This will be the first time, a private sector airline of Saudi Arabia has announced to launch its operations in Pakistan, which is the first country on the airline’s international network map.

He said the airlines will operate its Airbus A320 aircraft, and commence direct flights from Dammam to Lahore and Islamabad with a frequency of four flights per week and three flights per week connecting Dammam with Sialkot and Peshawar. The airlines will expand its operations in Pakistan to Karachi and Multan within months of its operations.

SBP chosen as the best central bank

KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has been voted as the best central bank in promoting Islamic finance second year in a row, by a poll conducted by International Finance News (IFN), an arm of Red Money Agency, Malaysia.

In 2016, Pakistan was awarded Global Islamic Finance Award (Advocacy Award) by Edbiz Consulting Limited, UK. Islamic banking industry has shown significant growth rate since its re-launch in 2002; by September 2017, its share stood at 11.9 per cent in terms of assets and 13.7pc in deposits, with a network of 2,368 branches across the country.—Staff Reporter

PTCL Cloud gets certification

KARACHI: Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited (PTCL) attained Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard certification v3.2 for its Infrastructure-As-A-Service offering PTCL Smart Cloud, making the country’s first SDN-enabled cloud infrastructure its most secure enterprise grade cloud platform, said a press release.

Fed projects $80bn payment to Treasury

WASHINGTON: The Federal Reserve says the payments it will make to the federal government based on its 2017 operations will drop to $80.2 billion, down 12.3 per cent from 2016.

It will be the second year that the payments have declined although they still remain about three times higher than the level in effect before 2008, when the Fed began a massive expansion of its bond holdings.

The Fed said higher interest payments to banks on their reserves were a major reason for the drop in payments to the government.

The $80.2b figure is preliminary and may change slightly when final results are released in March.—AP

Morgan Stanley trims US weighting

LONDON: Morgan Stanley has just raised its overweight recommendation on European stocks and trimmed its US weighting, adding to those expecting European stocks to outperform Wall Street this year.

Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2018