* EBRD holds annual meeting May 18-19

* Bank will seek new president, vote on N.Africa fund

* Emerging Europe a worry, as euro zone crisis rages

By Carolyn Cohn

LONDON, May 11 (Reuters) – Facing a possible change at its
helm, emerging Europe’s development bank risks stretching itself
thinly as mission creep into North Africa eats up resources
while the bank’s core charges feel the heat from raging euro
zone financial fires.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, set up
in 1991 to enable the former communist economies of the Soviet
Union make the transition to market economies, hosts its annual
meeting for its 65 country and multilateral shareholders at its
London headquarters on May 18-19.

As well as choosing a president for the next four years, the
bank will be voting on a 1 billion-euro fund for North Africa as
one of the first projects in its new push into a region
experiencing vast political upheaval.

Shareholders are also likely to discuss the spillover from
banking and growth problems into the EBRD’s original region of
central and eastern Europe and some analysts say the Bank may be
in danger of overstretching itself.

“When you think of the EBRD’s original mandate, it was quite
a different region and set of problems from the issues it is
facing with North Africa,” said Vanessa Rossi, global economics
adviser for Oxford Analytica.

Emerging Europe, with its close proximity to the troubled
euro zone, is still struggling to recover from the 2008/09
crisis.

“The EBRD has not finished with that problem when it has to
get started with another quite different set of circumstances,”
Rossi said.

The EBRD extended its mandate last year to North Africa due
to requests from its shareholders and the international
community, and has the expertise to carry out the job, an EBRD
spokesman said.

The bank, which will issue revised growth forecasts at its
meeting, is predicting growth of 3.2 percent for emerging Europe
this year, though only 1.7 percent for the richer central
European economies, such as Poland and Hungary and euro zone
countries Slovakia and Slovenia.

President Thomas Mirow and other EBRD officials are worried
about the threat posed to emerging Europe from deleveraging by
Western European banks.

“We will see continual efforts to deleverage, to shrink
balance sheets,” Mirow told Reuters Insider television in a
recent interview.

“What (banks) should avoid is to reduce the support and
lending to the real economy, to SMEs (small and medium
enterprises), and rather sell assets which have been bought on a
more speculative basis.”

Where EBRD member countries in central Europe were once
looking to “graduate” from being a recipient of EBRD funds and
in many cases join the euro zone, those bets are off with the
whole euro zone project looking creaky.

The EBRD will also next week publish growth forecasts for
the first time for the North African countries in which it is
starting to invest — Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia.

Egypt and Tunisia overthrew their presidents last year but
are struggling to get back on a firm financial footing, and
political instability remains a concern for the region.

The meeting marks the end of German Mirow’s four-year term
as president. Mirow is standing for a second term, but his
campaign lacks Germany’s backing, and the contest has turned
into a five-horse race, widely seen as part of a tussle for
other top European jobs.

When Mirow joined the EBRD in 2008, Lehman Brothers was
still a going concern, the Bank was predicting growth above 5
percent in emerging Europe and the full impact of the sub-prime
crisis had not yet been felt.

The EBRD was facing calls to be closed down, merged with the
European Investment Bank or to pay its shareholders a dividend
from the profits made from its largely private sector
investments.

The global financial crisis gave the EBRD a new lease of
life. Shareholders agreed to increase the bank’s capital to 30
billion euros ($38.98 billion) from 20 billion and the EBRD
spearheaded the Vienna Initiative which provided 33 billion
euros to support banking sector stability in the region.

The EBRD added Turkey to the portfolio of countries in which
it invests, and following the Arab Spring uprisings last year,
extended its mandate to include North Africa.

The Bank is now involved with the so-called Vienna 2.0
agreement, to prevent another banking crisis, as well as its
traditional investments such as a recent 135 million euro loan
to Turkish company Enerjisa to construct a wind farm.

PRESIDENTIAL RACE

Mirow is up against four other candidates for his job, after
European Union finance ministers, who hold a decisive vote in
the process, failed to agree a candidate. Russia and Bulgaria
have proposed his candidacy.

The president has to be elected by a simple majority of at
least 33 shareholders and by a majority weighted according to
the size of shareholding. The United States has the largest
shareholding by capital weighting at 10 percent, but France,
Germany and Italy each have more than 8 percent.

Britain is fielding a candidate for the first time — civil
servant Suma Chakrabarti — despite an unwritten rule that the
job will never go to someone from the UK as it houses the EBRD’s
headquarters.

The UK government considers Chakrabarti a “unity” candidate
who would sidestep Franco-German squabbles — previous
presidents have all been French or German — and keep the EBRD
position outside a carousel of EU jobs up for grabs to ensure a
balance of power in the European Union.

Euro zone sources say the French candidate, European
Investment Bank vice president Philippe de Fontaine Vive Curtaz,
is by no means a shoo-in but the French would like to see their
candidate installed as they are unlikely to get one of the other
jobs.

Those jobs are the chairmanship of the Eurogroup, the
policy-setting forum of euro zone finance ministers, a seat on
the European Central Bank’s executive board and head of the euro
zone’s permanent bail-out fund.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is in the running
for the Eurogroup chair, while Luxembourg’s Yves Mersch is
expected to get the ECB job and Spain could get the bail-out
fund.

The other two candidates for the EBRD presidency — Poland’s
Jan Krzysztof Bielecki and Serbia’s Bozidar Djelic — are
considered outsiders because of a conflict of interest, as their
countries are recipients of EBRD funds.

But if Mirow doesn’t keep the presidency, there is life
after the EBRD — his predecessor Jean Lemierre was a key
negotiator in Greece’s recent debt restructuring.

Published May 10th, 2012 – 08:38 GMTPress Release

As part of its long-term green strategy and continued efforts toward preserving the environment within the city of Aqaba, Aqaba Container Terminal (ACT) launched on Tuesday, May 8th a cleaning campaign targeting the shoreline and seabed of the diving area within the Aqaba Marine Park. The campaign was organized in collaboration with the Royal Marine Conservation Society of Jordan, the Aqaba Diving Association and the marine park itself. 

The campaign brought together 37 divers from several diving schools, the Marine Science Station and the Royal Marine Forces, in addition to 40 students from Al-Shamila School for Girls and a number of independent volunteers, all of whom collaborated on the collection of 50 bags containing hard waste scattered across the shoreline and the seabed. 

ACT’s CEO Soren Hansen explained that this campaign reflected the company’s commitment to preserving marine ecosystems and biodiversity in Aqaba and its surrounding areas by actively addressing its most pressing environmental challenges. He further noted that ACT continually works to find a viable balance between its prime objective of transforming Aqaba into a key industrial and commercial global hub and its unwavering commitment to preserving the city’s delicate environment. 

The Royal Marine Conservation Society of Jordan is considered the sole organization in the Kingdom dedicated to actively preserving marine environments and ecosystems through various activities, including capacity building and awareness campaigns targeting the local community. 

This campaign is part of a series of initiatives organized as part of ACT’s long-term CSR strategy that reflects the company’s unwavering commitment to the local community, particularly when it comes to preserving its environment and thriving marine ecosystems for future generations. 

New Delhi  In fields along a northern Indian highway, mountains of grain have turned black with mildew after getting soaked in the rain.

The millions of tonnes of wheat rotting because India ran out of warehouse space to hold another bumper crop illustrate a core problem of the nation’s food crisis: India can grow plenty of food but cannot store or transport it well enough to nourish its 1.2 billion people.

“
It is unfortunate that while people are dying of hunger, food grain is rotting in the open

Sharad Yadav, a key opposition leader

Warehouses are overflowing and huge quantities of wheat and rice are stored in fields under tarpaulins and thin plastic sheets, risking decay.

Storage

Article continues below

<span class="articleLocation”>(Reuters) – Emission control systems maker Clean Diesel Technologies Inc (CDTI.O) posted a bigger-than-expected quarterly loss, hurt by a sharp fall in gross margins, sending its shares down as much as 23 percent.

The company’s first-quarter widened to $2.8 million, or 39 cents per share, from $2.2 million, or 54 cents per share, in the year ago period.

The quarter included a $600,000 pretax charge related to inventory write-down at the company’s heavy duty diesel systems segment, which makes purifiers, filters and other accessories used in heavy duty vehicles.

Total revenue rose 23.3 percent to $17 million.

Analysts on average had expected a loss of 29 cents per share on revenue of $16 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Gross margins slipped to 23.2 percent from 29.1 percent.

Shares of the Ventura, California-based company were trading down 23 percent at $2.75 in early trading on Monday, making it one of the top percentage losers on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Divya Lad in Bangalore; Editing by Viraj Nair)

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A delegation from the International Energy Agency spent two days in Baghdad speaking with high-ranking officials in preparation for an end-of-year report on the country’s oil sector. By some estimates, Iraq could hold some of the largest oil reserves in the world and an international auction for oil and natural gas blocks is planned for May. Without a hydrocarbon law, and considering the fractured political system, the IEA’s report may be more about political obstacles than oil potential, however.

By Daniel J. Graeber of Oilprice.com

Baghdad announced triumphantly this week that oil production increased to more than 3 million barrels per day for the first time in more than 30 years. Exports, the government said, should increase substantially once a new floating oil terminal starts operations later this week. The IEA in December said crude oil production in Iraq could reach an average of 4.36 million bpd by 2016, about half of what Riyadh produces. The agency warned, however, that Iraq’s fractured political system might be as much of an obstacle as anything.

Iraq’s post-invasion political system has never been stable. Tensions in Baghdad flared up when Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused his Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi of terrorism almost as soon as the last American troop left the country in December. Juan Cole, the man behind the influential blog Informed Comment, said the action by Maliki “was part of an effort to marginalize and humiliate his Sunni enemies, and a sign of unwillingness to seek a grand national bargain.”

Iraq may be a democratic country in theory but it certainly isn’t quick on the political front, especially when it comes to passing a long-delayed hydrocarbon law. Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, described Iraqi politics as anything but stable.

“I wouldn’t hold my breath on getting anything accomplished on the oil law,” he said.

Maliki may be able to use his hard-ball tactics in an effort to get his way on things like the federal budget, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to widespread political influence across the rest of the country, said Cole.

Kurdish leaders objected profusely when it looked like Exxon Mobil would be left out of Iraq’s upcoming fourth international auction because of its contracts with the semiautonomous Kurdish government. Deputy Prime Minister Rowsch Nuri Shaways, a lawmaker from the Kurdistan Democratic Party, complained, in a statement, that Baghdad was somehow opposed to “economic openness” and the “promotion of trade.” Baghdad protests that any unilateral deals with the Kurdish government are illegal, though Cole said there isn’t much that the central government can do about it.

“The Iraqi government faces two big problems on petroleum development. It is still too weak to provide security reliably for the Western corporations and their employees,” he said. “And, it is still economically depressed enough to be afraid of being taken advantage of by a bidding process that favors the corporations — causing it to drive so hard a bargain that it has spooked potential investors.”

Iraq needs to exploit strategic location for energy exports

Iraq could be able to take advantage of its strategic position in the Middle East. Its Turkish neighbors to the north are keen to become an influential energy hub by playing host to some of the most ambitious oil and natural gas pipelines in the world. To Iraq’s south, the Strait of Hormuz transports about 20 percent of the oil traded globally.

“Politically, however, Iraq is landlocked,” said Cole.

Getting a federal budget passed this year might’ve been a temporary political victory for Maliki. Long term, however, it’s unlikely he’ll be able to make any claims to a political mandate in a country that relies so heavily on oil for its federal revenue. Baghdad has tilted at times toward Iran and higher oil prices may embolden the Shiite prime minister’s position. But Iraq might find itself in a geopolitical tug-of-war given Washington’s regional interests.

“Iraq is extremely vulnerable right now,” Cole warned.

The IEA is expected to release its report on Iraq in October as a prelude to its full energy outlook for 2012. While expressing optimism about the prospects for the oil sector in post-war Iraq, IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said politics are getting in the way of broader developments. When asked what he would title the October report from the IEA, Cole just chuckled and said “slow progress.”

Source: Oilprice.com