Day: May 14, 2018

The European Union on Monday warned Britain time was running out to seal a Brexit deal this fall and ensure London does not crash out of the bloc next March, adding to pressure on Prime Minister Theresa May.

May’s spokesman, however, said the “focus is on getting this right” rather than meeting a deadline.

The EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier told 27 ministers of the bloc meeting in Brussels on Monday that “no significant progress” had been made in negotiations with London since March, the Bulgarian chairwoman of the talks said.

Diplomats and officials in Brussels have raised doubts about whether the bloc and London will be able to mark a milestone in the negotiations at the summit of EU leaders on June 28-29.

The current schedule puts progress in June as an important step towards a final Brexit deal in October, which would leave enough time for an elaborate EU ratification process before the Brexit day.

“October is only five months from now and still some key issues related to the withdrawal agreement need to be settled.

In June we need to see substantive progress on Ireland, on governance and all remaining separation issues,” said Deputy Prime Minister Ekaterina Zakharieva of Bulgaria, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

‘No clear stance’

German, Austrian and Dutch ministers all echoed the same concern, saying Britain has not made its position clear in detail on parts of the negotiations.

“We are concerned that there is no clear stance, no clear position from the British. The clock is ticking,” German EU Minister Michael Roth told his EU peers.

“We need now to be making substantial progress, but that is not happening. What is worrying us in particular is the Northern Ireland question where we expect a substantial accommodation from the British side.”

At home, May is stuck between a rock and a hard place with staunch Brexit supporters pushing to sever ties with the EU and others advocating keeping close customs cooperation with the bloc to reduce frictions in future trade.

May’s spokesman said London was working on two options for post-Brexit customs cooperation.

Under a customs partnership, Britain could collect tariffs on goods entering the country on the EU’s behalf. Under a second idea, for a streamlined customs arrangement, traders on an approved list would be able to cross borders freely with the aid of automated technology.

Pressure

But the EU has said London must come up with a solution for the Irish border conundrum and highlights that has not happened.

Both sides worry that reinstating a physical border between EU-member Ireland and Britain’s province of Northern Ireland – including to manage customs – could revive violence there.

Other outstanding issues include guarantees for expatriate rights, agreeing on security cooperation and trade rules after Brexit.

With May’s cabinet, her ruling Conservative party and the British split on Brexit, the prime minister has come under increasing pressure at home in recent weeks to make a decision on customs.

The Brexit schedule is tightening, sources said, which helps the EU negotiating strategy to pile pressure on London before the June summit but mostly is due to lack of substantial headway in the talks.

Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok said it was too early to discuss an extension of the timeline, but added: “The aim is now to conclude a deal in the time schedule that has been agreed on  … I very much hope we will agree but there are no guarantees, unfortunately.”

 
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Investors looking to buy Venezuela’s new cryptocurrency may want to head to a little-known Moscow bank whose biggest shareholders are President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government and two state-controlled Russian companies under U.S. sanctions.

Evrofinance Mosnarbank has emerged as the only international financial institution so far willing to defy a U.S. campaign to derail the world’s first state-backed digital currency, called the petro, even before it begins to function.

Early would-be investors who registered with Venezuela’s government and downloaded the petro’s wallet software — available in Spanish, English and Russian — were then invited to buy the cryptocurrency by wiring a minimum of 1,000 euros to a Venezuelan government account at Evrofinance.

The bank’s place in the rollout of the petro is further evidence of Russia’s role in the creation of a cryptocurrency that much of the digital world has shunned but that Maduro hopes will allow Venezuela to circumvent U.S. financial sanctions imposed last year.

At the petro’s launch on Feb. 21, Maduro heaped praise on two Russians in the audience who worked with wealthy, Kremlin-connected businessmen, thanking their previously unknown startups — Zeus Exchange and Aerotrading — for their role developing what he joked would be a kind of “kryptonite” against U.S. economic dominance.

A day later, he dispatched his economy minister to Moscow to brief his Russian finance counterpart.

And in March, the Russian Association of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain awarded the Venezuelan government an award for its role “challenging the de-facto powers of the international financial system.”

‘Fighting a common bully’

Russia’s interest in the petro stems from its own increasingly pariah status in the west, said Claiborne W. Porter, the former head of the U.S. Justice Department’s bank integrity unit. As relations with the U.S. and European Union become more tense, both countries are looking for ways to demonstrate political strength while moving money outside the American financial system.

“Like kids on the playground, Venezuela and Russia think they are fighting a common bully in U.S. sanctions, so they’re going to try and form a united front,” said Porter, who is now the Washington-based head of investigations at consulting firm Navigant.

Russia has provided Venezuela with billions in debt relief over the years and is a major investor in the country’s oil industry. That financial lifeline has become more important since the Trump administration last year banned Americans from lending money to the nearly bankrupt government and now threatens to slap sanctions on the OPEC nation’s oil industry if Maduro goes ahead with presidential elections this month that are widely seen as a sham. In March, Trump signed an executive order banning Americans from any dealings with the petro.

Evrofinance and its executives didn’t return repeated email requests for comment. But after The Associated Press’ inquiries, all references to the bank were removed from the petro’s wallet, leaving prospective buyers with no guidance on how to actually buy it, though it’s still listed for sale in rubles and euros as well as three other widely circulated cryptocurrencies.

Venezuela’s government purchased a 49 percent stake in Evrofinance in 2011, making the bank, which traces its history back a century as a western financial outpost for the Soviet Union, a vehicle for binational trade and investment projects, with almost $800 million in assets.

The rest of the shares are held by two major banks, state-controlled VTB and Gazprombank, which were sanctioned by the U.S. and European nations in 2014 over President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

It’s unclear how many petros the government has sold. Maduro boasted this month that the government had raised $3.3 billion in the pre-sale phase. But so far only a small fraction of the petros appears to have been distributed to buyers, according to the blockchain where the digital currency’s movements can be publicly tracked.

‘Scam’

Experts say that the petro is of little interest to foreigners other than drug traffickers and others active in Venezuela’s burgeoning criminal underworld. Even offshore trading platforms like Bitfinex are refusing to deal in the petro for fear of violating sanctions. Rating website ICOindex.com, which tracks initial coin offerings of cryptocurrencies, called it a “scam.”

“An overwhelming majority of ICOs don’t deliver on what they promise because their promoters are outright scammers or fall short on technical expertise,” said Alejandro Machado, a Venezuelan-born computer scientist who consults for crypto startups.  “In the case of the Venezuelan government, both reasons apply.”

One of the two Russians who signed agreements with Maduro to position the petro globally, Denis Druzhkov, had been fined $31,000 and barred for three years by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for fraudulent trading in futures’ contracts. Zeus Exchange, which Druzhkov created alongside a Kremlin-connected industrialist, said in a statement that it has never had any business ties with the Venezuelan government and that Druzhkov resigned after abusing his authority.

The other, Fedor Bogorodskiy, used to help run the credit card division at a bank controlled by a Russian oligarch.  He has lived in Uruguay since 2009, combining telecommunications business with part-time promotion of Russian culture. He told The AP that his company, Aerotrading, whose website consists of a single home page with no company information, immediately ceased all work on the petro after Trump announced his ban.

Despite the pressure, Maduro is showing no signs of slowing down. He’s given government institutions — from ministries to airports — 120 days to start accepting the petro as legal tender in all transactions. He’s also paved the way for the creation of 16 local exchanges where Venezuelans will be able to purchase petros with their fast-depreciating bolivars. Also in the works is a second state-backed cryptocurrency tied to the country’s gold reserves.

But gaining international acceptance remains an uphill battle.

Yuri Pripachkin, president of the Russian blockchain group that honored Venezuela, said that while the Kremlin is keeping a close eye on the petro it hasn’t been involved in its development. Still, he said as long as sanctions are used as a foreign policy tool to punish governments that challenge U.S. policies, the incentives to seek out alternative means of financing will remain. He also dismissed the idea that the petro could be used to fund criminal activity.

“That’s a fairy tale,” said Pripachkin. “The most popular currency for terrorists and criminals the world over is the U.S. dollar, not crypto, and nobody is suggesting we ban dollars. This is just an attempt to stop crypto from expanding.”

 
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In South Africa, workers will soon begin construction of a new 100 megawatt solar power plant near the town of Pofadder. In Morocco, expansion of a giant solar power plant near the city of Ourzazate will soon increase its capacity to 580 megawatts. Solar energy has been slower to arrive in West Africa, but  growth is underway.

West Africa’s largest solar power station was officially opened in November 2017. It’s at Zagtouli, on the outskirts of Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou. It cost $55 million to build; the money came from France and the European Union. Zagtouli now delivers 30 megawatts to the national power grid.

Before Zagtouli, this was West Africa’s largest, at Bokhol, in Senegal. It opened in 2016, cost $30 million to build but the money story here is different.

Charlotte Aubin, founder and director of Greenwish, a renewable energy company, was closely involved. She helped create the first Independent Power Producer, or IPP, with money from Senegalese investors and an international fund backed by three European governments.

“The first project we did was in Senegal and it was a milestone for the continent as well as Greenwish,” said Aubin. “It was the first solar IPP that came out of the ground in Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s now providing electricity to 160,000 people in Senegal at a 40 percent discount to the cost of the grid at the time.”

Forty percent less? How is that possible? Moussa Coulibaly, who runs Air Com, one of Mali’s oldest solar power companies, explains.

It’s the expansion of the technology, Coulibaly told VOA. The more people want a product, the cheaper it gets. Led by investment from the United States and China, the industry has been rapidly scaling up. Production costs have come down as a result. Coulibaly says he has seen the price of a solar panel reduced by more than 500 percent in Mali… in only twelve years. He says today, a solar panel will cost you CFA 50,000 — that’s about $90.

Something else has changed too in the region: the law. Until recently, independent power producers like Air Com and the Greenwish project could not exist. The law simply prohibited it. Senegal lifted the ban on non-state power production in 1998; Mali did it in 2000, while Burkina Faso legalized IPPs only last year.

Senegal now has four solar power stations. Burkina Faso is building two more. South Africa and Morocco have dozens each. And the list is getting longer: Kenya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Ghana, Mauritania…

At nighttime, an estimated 600 million Africans still use candles and kerosene lamps to light their homes. Many live in the continent’s vast rural zones. How do you get all those millions connected?

Charlotte Aubin has an idea that would use existing structures — telephone towers.

“There are about 240,000 towers that are off-grid or bad grid that could benefit from clean tech solution… but we are also looking at doing more for [the] population.”

Interest in off-grid solar is booming in West Africa. Companies like Air Com in Mali build small local grids, tailor-made for the communities they serve.

Coulibaly says we make an estimate of the electricity needs of a particular village — now and in the future. And then we build an independent local solar-powered grid based on those estimates.

It’s true: solar alone will not be enough to fulfill Africa’s energy needs. But for private power producers and small independent off-grid networks, the future looks bright.

 
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Bailout inspectors have returned to Athens as Greece races to comply with the final terms of its rescue program, which ends in August.

Negotiations resumed Monday, with Greece still facing dozens of measures to address in the next ten days to remain on track for an agreement next month on the terms of bailout debt repayment after the program ends.

Athens is seeking a full return to financing itself on international bond markets following eight years of dependence on loans from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund. But some creditors favor a more gradual approach.

Among the economic measures still under discussion are protections for families facing home repossession and an end to sales-tax exemptions in areas affected by the refugee crisis.
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Some of the biggest automakers in Europe are joining forces to build a highway network of fast-charging stations they hope will boost sales of electric vehicles.

The idea is to let drivers plug in, charge in minutes instead of hours, and speed off again — from Norway to southern Italy, and Portugal to Poland.

Much is at stake for the automakers, which include Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler and Ford. Their joint venture, Munich-based Ionity, is pushing to roll out its network in time to service the next generation of battery-only cars coming on the market starting next year from Volkswagen’s Porsche and Audi, BMW and Daimler.

They’re aiming to win back some of the market share for electric luxury car sales lost to Tesla, which has its own, proprietary fast-charging network.

 
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