Barclays in Qatar loan probe
UK authorities are probing an allegation that Barclays loaned Qatar money to invest in the bank as part of its cash call at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, which enabled the bank to avoid a UK government bailout.
Neither Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Than nor Qatar Holding is accused of wrongdoing. Their lawyer at Stephenson Harwood and their spokesman declined to comment.
The bank said the authorities’ investigations were ongoing. It neither denied nor confirmed the revelation.
Owner of O2 arena in bidders’ sights
An Australian shopping centre operator, a Los Angeles bank chief executive and a Qatari quasi-sovereign wealth fund are among those expected to submit bids of $5bn-$8bn for Anschutz Entertainment Group, owner of London’s O2 arena, as early as next week.
Amazon paralysed by outage
Amazon’s homepage was knocked out for 49 minutes on Thursday afternoon in US eastern time, in an unusual outage that partly paralysed the world’s biggest ecommerce business by sales. The firm confirmed the US outage.