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Торги на міжбанківському валютному ринку станом на 12:45 відбувалися на рівні 28 гривень 48–50 копійок
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Заступник голови Офісу президента уточнив, що йдеться про щомісячні втрати, починаючи з січня
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Ethiopia began producing electricity on Sunday from its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a multi-billion-dollar hydropower plant on the River Nile that neighbors Sudan and Egypt have worried will cause water shortages downstream.

After flicking a digital switch to turn on the turbines in the first phase of the project, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sought to assure those nations that his country did not wish to harm their interests.

“Ethiopia’s main interest is to bring light to 60% of the population who is suffering in darkness, to save the labor of our mothers who are carrying wood on their backs in order to get energy,” Abiy said.

Abiy’s government says the project is key to its economic development, but Egypt and Sudan depend on the waters of the Nile and have worried it will affect them.

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry accused Ethiopia of further violation of a preliminary deal signed between the three nations in 2015, prohibiting any of the parties from taking unilateral actions in the use of the river’s water.

The first violations of the initial agreement related to the filling of the dam, the ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

There was no immediate comment from Sudan.

Ethiopia, the second most populous country on the continent, has the second biggest electricity deficit in Africa according to the World Bank, with about two thirds of the population of around 110 million lacking a connection to the grid.

The project will ultimately cost $5 billion when it is completed and become the biggest hydropower plant in Africa by generating 5,150 MW of electricity, some of which will be exported to neighboring nations, the government says.

The government has so far invested more than 100 billion Ethiopian birr ($1.98 billion) in the project, state-affiliated FANA broadcaster reported. It is located at a place called Guba in the western Benishangul-Gumuz region.
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A German newspaper and other media on Sunday said a leak of data from Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-biggest bank, reveals details of the accounts of more than 30,000 clients — some of them unsavory — and points to possible failures of due diligence in checks on many customers.

Credit Suisse said in a statement that it “strongly rejects the allegations and insinuations about the bank’s purported business practices.”

The German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung said it received the data anonymously through a secure digital mailbox over a year ago. It said it’s unclear whether the source was an individual or a group, and the newspaper didn’t make any payment or promises. 

The newspaper said it evaluated the data, which ranged from the 1940s until well into the last decade, along with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and dozens of media partners including The New York Times and The Guardian. 

It said the data points to the bank having accepted “corrupt autocrats, suspected war criminals and human traffickers, drug dealers and other criminals” as customers.

Credit Suisse said the allegations are “predominantly historical” and that “the accounts of these matters are based on partial, inaccurate, or selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank’s business conduct.”

The bank said it had reviewed a large number of accounts potentially associated with the allegations, and about 90% of them “are today closed or were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries, of which over 60% were closed before 2015.”

As for accounts that remain active, the bank said it is “comfortable that appropriate due diligence, reviews and other control related steps were taken in line with our current framework.” The bank also said the law prevents it from commenting on “potential client relationships.”

Switzerland has sought in recent years to shed its image as a haven for tax evasion, money laundering and the embezzlement of government funds, practices carried out through the misuse of its banking secrecy policies. But those laws still draw criticism.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung published an excerpt from a statement by the source of the leak.

“I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” it said. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”
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UNICEF announced Sunday an emergency cash support effort for all public education teachers in Afghanistan for January and February, saying the move will allow continued access to education for all school-age girls and boys.

The European Union-funded payment, amounting to the equivalent of $100 a month per teacher, will benefit an estimated 194,000 male and female teachers across the country who have not been paid for six months.

UNICEF said in a statement that the agency and partners have taken the initiative in recognition of the “crucial role” these teachers in Afghanistan are playing in the education of around 8.8 million enrolled in public schools.

“Following months of uncertainty and hardship for many teachers, we are pleased to extend emergency support to public school teachers in Afghanistan who have spared no effort to keep children learning,” said Mohamed Ayoya, UNICEF’s country representative

Ayoya said UNICEF would need an additional $250 million to be able to continue supporting public school teachers and called on donors to help the agency fund the initiative.

Since militarily taking over the country in mid-August, the Taliban have allowed women to resume work in health and education, and opened private and public universities to female education, while secondary school girls are also back in school in about a dozen of the 34 Afghan provinces.

The new Islamist rulers have pledged to allow all girls to return to school by late March, blaming delays on financial constraints and the time it takes to ensure that female students resume classes in accordance with Islamic Sharia law.

Relief agencies say humanitarian needs have skyrocketed in war-torn Afghanistan since the Taliban took power last year and U.S.-led international forces withdrew from the country.

The United States and other Western nations have halted nonhumanitarian funding to Afghanistan, amounting to 40% of the country’s gross domestic product, and blocked the Taliban’s access to billions of dollars in Afghan central bank reserves, mostly held in the United States.

The restrictions have pushed the fragile Afghan economy to the brink of collapse, worsening the humanitarian crisis stemming from years of war and natural calamities.

The United Nations is warning that nearly 23 million people — about 55% of the poverty-stricken country’s population — face extreme hunger, with nearly 9 million a step away from famine.

Tomas West, the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, while speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, said Washington was also playing its role in ensuring Afghan girls return to schools next month.

“We have before the World Bank a proposal to extend roughly $180 million in support of teacher stipends and in support of books and in support of refurbishment of buildings and so forth,” he said.

“But what do we need to see from the Taliban? We need to see them deliver on stated commitments to open and enroll women and girls in education countrywide… after Nowruz [the first day of Afghan new year] on March 20th,” West stressed.

No country has yet recognized the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. Before considering the legitimacy issue, the global community wants the Islamist group to install an inclusive government in Kabul representing all Afghan ethnic groups, ensure women’s rights to education and work, and prevent terrorist groups from using Afghan soil for attacks against other countries
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Firefighters are struggling to put out a fire that broke out on Wednesday on a vessel carrying thousands of luxury cars, which is adrift off the coast of Portugal’s Azores islands, a port official said, adding it was unclear when they would succeed.

The Felicity Ace ship, carrying around 4,000 vehicles including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, some electric with lithium-ion batteries, caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday. The 22 crew members on board were evacuated on the same day.

“The intervention [to put out the blaze] has to be done very slowly,” João Mendes Cabañas, captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, told Reuters late on Saturday. “It will take a while.”

Lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicles on board are “keeping the fire alive,” Cabañas said, adding that specialist equipment to extinguish it was on the way.

It was not clear whether the batteries sparked the fire.

Volkswagen, which owns the brands, did not confirm the total number of cars on board and said on Friday it was awaiting further information. Ship manager Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Cabañas previously said that “everything was on fire about five meters above the water line” and the blaze was still far from the ship’s fuel tanks. It is getting closer, he said.

“The fire spread further down,” he said, explaining that teams could only tackle the fire from outside by cooling down the ship’s structure as it was too dangerous to go on board.

They also cannot use water because adding weight to the ship could make it more unstable, and traditional water extinguishers do not stop lithium-ion batteries from burning, Cabañas said.

The Panama-flagged ship will be towed to a country in Europe or to the Bahamas but it is unclear when that will happen.
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A major initiative to strengthen and cement America’s ties with Asia and counterbalance China’s expanding influence lacks robust trade incentives that are viewed as politically perilous in the United States, where protectionist sentiment runs high, experts told VOA.

The United States needs to intensify its focus on the Indo-Pacific region because of the “mounting challenges” posed by the rise of China, according to a strategy document released by the Biden administration last week.

“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] is combining its economic, diplomatic, military and technological might as it pursues a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and seeks to become the world’s most influential power,” the strategy document said.

That description of China largely mirrors the view taken by the former Trump administration, which often took a bluntly adversarial stance toward Beijing. Beyond rhetoric, however, Biden’s strategy seeks to shore up regional alliances and partnerships that many see as critical to U.S. strategy in Asia.

It responds to the desire of many countries in the region for the United States to play a galvanizing role in addressing common challenges such as public health, climate change and anti-corruption, Ryan Hass, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told VOA.

“It is a welcome departure from the America-first mindset during the Trump era,” Hass said.

No economic framework, leadership

The new strategy calls for advancing freedom and openness, building collective defense capacity within and beyond the region, and building regional resilience. It also embraces what the administration calls “promoting shared prosperity.”

But Hass and other observers say the Indo-Pacific strategy lacks a coherent trade framework that gives countries in the region a good economic reason to deepen relations with the U.S. They say Washington’s international economic agenda should match the leadership role the United States seeks for itself in the region.

Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, told VOA the strategy suffers from a fundamental contradiction in that it implies that the U.S. will engage in a high degree of global activism, following years of far more isolationist foreign policy under the Trump administration. At the same time, the Biden administration has not primed the American public to shift away from the Trumpian critique of globalization.

“They’ve put themselves in a box where they, for political reasons, seem to accept the Trump view that globalization is the playground of self-indulgent coastal American elites who don’t care about the heartland [of America],” Daly said. “What was needed was a better form of globalization that serves American interests — the Biden administration has chosen not to take that on.

Preceding Trump, the former Obama administration championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade agreement with 11 other countries designed to be the cornerstone of U.S. economic policy in the region. The Trump administration withdrew from the TPP in 2017, leaving the other members to sign a revised deal, called Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

With no public support for multilateral trade agreements, the Biden administration has said it has no plans to join the CPTPP and has made clear it intends to continue its predecessor’s protectionist trade policies.

The White House has not yet shared details of its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a component of the larger Indo-Pacific Strategy. The framework, which they billed as a “multilateral partnership for the 21st century,” was scheduled for launch early this year.

“As we consult with the Indo-Pacific partners, Congress and other stakeholders, we will have more to share as the process is ongoing,” deputy White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told VOA on Thursday. “It’s underway.”

The administration said the framework would “promote and facilitate high-standards trade, govern the digital economy, improve supply-chain resiliency and security, catalyze investment in transparent, high-standards infrastructure, and build digital connectivity — doubling down on our economic ties to the region while contributing to broadly shared Indo-Pacific opportunity.”

But officials have acknowledged the framework will not include opening up American markets, the economic carrot that analysts say is missing from the strategy.

“Why would regional states agree to serious concessions on climate or labor standards if the United States is unwilling to discuss trade or investment liberalization?” asked Zack Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It appears that Washington is content to remain on the sidelines as Beijing integrates more deeply into the region’s economic order.”

In a briefing to reporters this month, a senior administration official acknowledged that regional countries want more but are “very realistic” about the constraints and challenges that shape the Biden trade policy.

Build Back Better World

Some analysts see the potential for incentives beyond market access.

“The promise of this [Indo-Pacific] initiative is that it will offer some other things that aren’t market access,” said Matthew Goodman, senior vice president for economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Goodman told VOA those may include improving international trade regulations or investing in infrastructure as promised in the Build Back Better World initiative.

Biden launched his Build Back Better World plan (B3W) during the June 2021 Group of Seven summit, with the goal of creating “a values-driven, high-standard and transparent infrastructure partnership” to help finance projects in developing countries.

U.S. officials led by Daleep Singh, the deputy national security adviser for international economics, have scouted several countries in Latin America and Africa to identify potential infrastructure projects, particularly those that focus on climate, health, digital technology and gender equality.

“There’s been enormous enthusiasm in every country we visited, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Ghana, Senegal, DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], parts of the Middle East, Indonesia, Thailand, and other parts of the world,” Singh told VOA Friday.

B3W has been framed as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s international development program that has financed infrastructure projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America and has made inroads in Europe. China’s BRI investments have been criticized by outside groups for not assessing environmental and social impacts, lacking financial transparency and leaving some governments struggling to pay for costly infrastructure.

“The reason there’s so much enthusiasm is that countries do want a choice,” Singh said. “For a long time. China has been the only game in town for many of these countries, and in many cases, they have buyers regret.”

Last year the administration promised to include details of some initial projects during the formal launch of the initiative, originally scheduled for early 2022.

“We will have more details to come in the coming months on how to continue to implement this initiative, and the projects the U.S. government is investing in with allies and partners,” Jean-Pierre said to VOA Thursday. “This is something that the president is committed to.”

Allies and partners

Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy promises steps to deepen America’s existing treaty alliances with Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand. It also aims to strengthen relationships with regional partners such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Pacific Islands.

Continuing Trump’s approach, the administration is putting strong emphasis on the Quad – a regional grouping among the U.S., India, Japan and Australia.

Much of the strategy rests on the presumption of what the other actors will do, according to Aparna Pande, director of the Hudson Institute’s Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia.

“Japan and South Korea should get along, ASEAN should remain central, India should play a bigger role,” she told VOA, pointing out that with India’s plummeting economic growth, New Delhi may not be able to accept that challenge.

The strategy also aims to strengthen deterrence of military threats, with Japan and South Korea to pursue denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang has taken a series of provocative steps while ignoring Washington’s offer of talks without preconditions.

North Korea conducted 11 missile launches in January, a record in a single month, including a new type of “hypersonic missile” able to maneuver at high speed. It has also raised the possibility of restarting nuclear or intercontinental ballistic missile tests.

Military deals

While the Biden administration is not offering greater access to American markets, it has been handing out military deals.

Earlier this month, the administration approved a possible $100 million sale of equipment and services to Taiwan to “sustain, maintain and improve” its Patriot missile defense system.

The sale is in line with the Indo-Pacific Strategy goal of supporting Taipei’s self-defense capabilities in hopes of promoting peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. However, it has triggered an angry threat of retaliation from Beijing, which claims the democratically self-governed Taiwan as its breakaway province.

Earlier this month, the administration also approved the potential sale of F-15ID aircraft and related equipment to Indonesia in a deal valued at up to $13.9 billion, despite human rights concerns that have delayed previous arms sales to the country. The last arms deal made by Washington and Jakarta was in 2011.

Other deals include AUKUS, the September trilateral security pact with Australia and the United Kingdom to provide Canberra with nuclear-powered submarines.

More deals are expected and sharper contours of the Indo-Pacific Strategy may take shape as Biden hosts ASEAN leaders in Washington in the coming months and travels to the region for summits later in the year.
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India and the United Arab Emirates signed an agreement Friday that the two countries expect will increase bilateral trade to $100 billion in five years.  It is the first of several free trade deals that New Delhi is racing to conclude this year to expand its pandemic-hit economy.  

Economists say it reflects a significant change from the past, when India, which has protected several sectors of its economy with high tariffs, was slow to conclude free trade pacts.   

The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement was signed during a virtual summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. 

“This is reflective of the new emerging world order, the post-COVID world, which will see new alignments and realignments in which we see the UAE and India as strong partners,” Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said after the pact was signed.  

The UAE is India’s third-largest export partner after the United States and China, with bilateral trade of about $60 billion.   

While the UAE hopes the pact will help make it a business hub, India says it will give it access to markets in Africa and West Asia and create more than a million jobs in labor-intensive sectors such as the auto industry.   

In 2019, worries about cheap imports from China led India to exit the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact, which took effect this year among Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and 10 other Asian countries. That prevented India from gaining preferential access to fast-growing markets and led to concerns that one of the world’s major economies was turning more protectionist.  

Goyal said that India is no longer signing trade pacts to join a group but looking at agreements with nations that have values of democracy, transparency and mutual growth.

“We are talking not of closing India’s doors but actually opening India’s doors wider for greater international engagement,” he said.   

New Delhi hopes that the bilateral trade pacts that it is negotiating with countries such as Britain, Australia, the European Union and Israel will help it get greater market access.  

For many of those countries, building closer economic ties with New Delhi would help reduce their huge trade dependence on China, which they want to do amid unease about Beijing’s rise in several countries.    

After suffering a major contraction last year, India’s economy grew by about 9% last year, the fastest among major economies.  

“Exports have been buoyant since the beginning of last year when India started coming out of the economic downturn and the government is trying to see what more can be done to get additional market access. They really want to push forward and aim for greater exports,” Biswajit Dhar, Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University told VOA.

India aims to close trade agreements with Australia and Britain by the end of this year to boost exports to $500 billion by 2023.  

Even before hammering out a more comprehensive deal, New Delhi hopes to clinch a limited trade pact, termed an “early harvest agreement,” with Australia next month. Both countries are members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad along with the United States and Japan, formed with an eye on China.  

The grouping has also given an impetus to trade relations between the member countries, Australian Trade, Tourism, and Investment Minister Dan Tehan, said in New Delhi earlier this month during a visit to discuss the free trade pact.

“I think the Quad has just added to the strength of the relationship. My hope is within 30 days we will have an announcement [on an interim trade agreement] with India. Then we can start to build the economic cooperation within the Quad,” he said.  

British Secretary of State for International Trade Anne-Marie Trevelyan also visited India last month to start negotiations on a free trade agreement between the two countries.

While Britain hopes to double its exports to India by 2035 by tapping into its large middle class, New Delhi wants greater opportunities for Indians to study and work there.    

“The government has adopted a very interesting pathway for agreements with Britain and Australia. They are trying to do an early harvest agreement for sectors that are ready at this point to accept reciprocal market access as they are confident to face competition from imports,” said Dhar.

“This will lead to some forward movement in terms of working toward broader free trade agreements,” he added. 

Suhasini Sood contributed to this story.
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Торги на українському міжбанківському валютному ринку завершуються на рівні 28 гривень 37,5–39,5 копійки за долар
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