It will take 40 years to renovate 8.7 million crumbling properties in the 10 new EU member states.

PRAGUE,
CZECH REPUBLIC, March 16--As much as 320 billion euros ($426.1 billion) is needed to renovate post-World War II apartment blocks across the European Union, according to a report published Tuesday in Prague, AFP reported.
Confronted with huge needs, EU housing ministers called on the European Commission to free up EU funds to finance part of the necessary work.
Already acute in some districts in western Europe, the rapid ageing of multi-dwelling buildings in Europe is even more worrying in the former communist countries.
“The problem is more important in the new EU member countries,“ emphasized Dutch Housing Minister Sybilla Dekker, who presented a lengthy report on the renovation of multi-dwelling buildings during a two-day conference in the Czech capital.
The ministers agreed to press the commission for talks on the question “as quickly as possible“.
In a letter addressed to the European Commission, the ministers emphasized the renovation of apartment blocks would enable the EU to fulfill some of its priority objectives: growth, employment and energy savings.
“The refurbishment of housing and revitalization of urban quarters in this context can make a major contribution to central EU-objectives such as growth, employment and especially energy efficiency and climate protection,“ the ministers said in a letter to be sent to the commission.
The use of EU funds, particularly structural funds aimed at aiding poorer regions, has been sharply restricted for housing improvements.
The Dutch report noted that most European countries had built massive housing blocks to replace homes destroyed during the Second World War and to meet the demands of urbanization.
But the housing blocks have aged badly and the problem was particularly acute in the former communist countries of the EU, where more than one-third of the population lived in apartment blocks.
The Dutch report estimated it would take 40 years to renovate 8.7 million crumbling properties in the 10 new EU member states, and highlighted underfunded maintenance in the past.
While the number of dwellings per 1,000 inhabitants was 468 among the original 15 EU member nations, it was 355 in the 10 new EU states.
More than one third of dwellings are high-rise buildings in the 10 new members, compared with fewer than one in seven in the older states.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic,
March 16--Vodafone of Britain is to pay $4.4 billion to buy Czech mobile phone operator Oskar Mobil and Romanian Mobifon from Canadian Telesystem International Wireless (TIW), Vodafone and TIW said on Tuesday.
Vodafone will pay about $3.5 billion (2.6 billion euros) in cash and will also assume about $950 million of net debt.
Analysts said that that the entrance of Vodafone, which has more than 150 million customers worldwide, would shake up the Czech market.
TIW said that the sales concerned its holdings of 79.0 percent of MobiFon SA and 100 percent of Oskar Mobil.
MobiFon, which launched commercial operations in 1997, is the market leader in Romania with a 48 percent market share and 4.91 million subscribers and Vodafone already has a 20-percent stake in the company.
Oskar, which launched in March 2000, is the youngest Czech carrier with a 17-percent market share and 1.83 million customers.
Vodafone announced the purchase in a statement to the London Stock Exchange and its chief executive Arun Sarin said, “I am delighted that MobiFon and Oskar, both fast growing mobile operators, will become part of Vodafone, where they will benefit fully from the global services and scale benefits that our group can deliver.“ The deal would further Vodafone’s ambitions in Europe, he added.
“These acquisitions will create value for our shareholders and will be good for our customers. They are also consistent with our stated strategy of increasing investment in Central and Eastern Europe.“
“We expect the sale to be completed some time in the third quarter of this year,“ Vodafone spokesman Bobby Leach told AFP. “These two companies would be in line with our focus on central and eastern Europe as a driver of our future growth. Both companies are growing at a very good rate and these are good markets. In Romania penetration is less than 50 percent,“ he added.

MUSCAT, Oman, March 16--Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told Omani entrepreneurs Tuesday that his country had never been more attractive to foreign investors, AFP reported.
“Pakistan is set to join Asia’s top 10, thanks to 7 percent growth this year against 4.5 percent in 1998-1999,“ when Pervez Musharraf, now Pakistan’s president, seized power in a military coup, Aziz told representatives of the private sector on the second day of a visit to Oman.
“We were totally bankrupt when President Musharraf took over. We are going to be among Asia’s top 10 by the end of this year,“ Aziz said.
Even tycoons such as Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal were now investing in Pakistan, he said.
Prince Alwaleed, whose group manages an international network of luxury hotels, said during a visit to Islamabad on Monday that he would set up three major hotels in Pakistan. Speaking after talks with Aziz, he said the hotels would be built in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore. The prince did not specify the estimated cost of the projects, but expressed interest in investing in other sectors of Pakistan’s economy.
Praising the country’s economic recovery since Musharraf seized power in 1999, he said, “Pakistan is on the right track, it is the golden age in the new history of Pakistan.“
Aziz discussed ways of boosting ties between Oman and Pakistan during a meeting with Sultan Qaboos on Tuesday.

WASHINGTON, March 16--Citigroup, Bank of America and seven other banks enabled former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and members of his family to build a sprawling secret network of accounts to conceal his wealth, Senate investigators charged in a report released Tuesday, AP reported.
One of those institutions, Riggs Bank, had a relationship with Pinochet that was far more extensive and long-standing than previously believed, the report found.
The banks allowed Pinochet to use phony account names, offshore accounts and other deceptions to hide an estimated $13 million or more from US examiners and from international prosecutors seeking to seize assets they claim were pilfered from government funds, according to the report by the staff of the Senate Governmental Affairs investigative subcommittee.
Some banks, including Riggs and Citigroup, had a relationship with Pinochet and his family for 24 or 25 years, the investigators found. The accounts have since been closed. The investigators said all the banks cooperated with their inquiry.
The investigators’ findings raise questions about the oversight of the banks by federal regulators, who already have been faulted for failed supervision of Riggs’s operations in the face of repeated lapses.
The findings illuminate “another chapter in a very tawdry episode in American banking,“ Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the subcommittee’s senior Democrat, said Tuesday.
Riggs pleaded guilty in January to a criminal felony charge of failing to report suspicious transactions to authorities, including those in Pinochet’s accounts, and has agreed to pay $41 million in civil and criminal fines to the US government.
In a statement, Citigroup said its accounts for Pinochet, “which he opened with false documentation using pseudonyms, were shut down nearly a decade ago“ and the bank began closing any remaining accounts for his children in 1998.
In the late 1990s, Citigroup was criticized by lawmakers for its handling of millions of dollars deposited by officials of several foreign countries who were accused of money laundering and corruption.
Bank of America maintained three accounts and as many as six CDs for one of Pinochet’s daughters according to the 83-page report.
The others named in the report are Banco de Chile in the United States; Espirito Santo Bank, Ocean Bank and PineBank in Florida; Banco Atlantico, now part of Banco de Sabadell; and Coutts & Co. (USA) International, now part of Spain’s Banco Santander.

A lone protestor stands outside a GA conference on climate change attended by Gordon Brown in London on Tuesday. (Reuters Photo)

LONDON, March 16--Britain told the world’s biggest polluters including the United States on Tuesday that only by placing the environment at the heart of economic policy could they prevent a crisis caused by global warming, Reuters reported.
Britain hosted a two-day brainstorming on climate change by ministers and senior officials from 20 countries in the run-up to a July meeting of the eight most industrialized nations--the G8 group.
The need for action to avert a looming climate catastrophe was rammed home by graphic images of melting glaciers and makeshift sea defenses displayed at the venue of the meeting.
“We must make climate stability, energy investment and energy security central to economic policies,“ British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown told the meeting. “International cooperation is again the only way forward.“ Brown said he would study the costs and feasibility of so-called carbon sequestration--the capture and burial deep underground of millions of tons of the carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning power stations.
The Kyoto Protocol on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases came into force in February but is still shunned by the world’s biggest emitter, the United States, and puts scant limits on China as it rises fast up the pollution ranks.
Senior officials from both countries attended the London meeting, aiming to discuss ways to achieve the environmental Holy Grail of sustainably growing low carbon economies.
The US delegate made it clear energy efficiency, not a radical shift to a low carbon economy, should be the key. “We are now trying to find a portfolio in which three words are important, technology, technology, technology,“ US President George W. Bush’s chief environment adviser James L. Connaughton said before the meeting.
As about 30 people banged pots and pans in the street outside to protest at what they said was rich nation hypocrisy, speakers stressed the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency and switch to renewable resources. And that did not just mean wind and wave power. Nuclear power--anathema to the green lobby--had to remain an option.
“We will keep the nuclear option open,“ British Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt said, noting that while it was a low carbon technology there were major questions over its true costs and the problem of nuclear waste storage.

KABUL, Afghanistan, March 16--Afghanistan’s budget will reach $678 million in 2005, a 15 percent increase on last year’s figure, the Finance Ministry said Tuesday, AFP reported.
The ministry reported the country’s economic growth at 7.5 percent for 2004.
“The budget is balanced,“ Afghan Finance Minister Anwar Ul-Haq Ahady told reporters at a press conference saying that he intended to maintain “strict financial discipline.“
Of the $678 million Afghan budget in 2005, domestic tax revenues are expected to stand at $333 million for the fiscal year beginning March 21.
The remaining $280 million for the country’s reconstruction and $65 million for security will be drawn from foreign dollars, mainly the US, and the European Union, he said.
Around 90 percent of the budget will be funneled through Afghan ministries with the remainder allocated to run a legislature expected to be elected later this year.
About 24 percent of government funds will go to the Interior Ministry which deals with counter-narcotics and security, 20 percent to Defense and a further 19.7 percent to Education, Ahady said.
Afghanistan’s economy was hard hit by drought last year which saw economic growth fall to 7.5 percent, compared with 18 percent in 2003 and 29 percent in 2002, he said.
Afghanistan has been suffering from drought for the last seven years which was one reason behind a boom in opium cultivationÐ-a black economy which underpins growth and is not included in government figures.
Opium poppy cultivation surged by 64 percent on-year in 2004 according to the UN, and accounted for some 40 to 60 percent of Afghanistan’s economic growth in 2004.
The World Bank said that the narcotics industry was “Afghanistan’s premier economic activity.“

MARBELLA, Spain, March 16--Spanish officials Tuesday pointed the finger at Gibraltar as Spain widened an investigation into the biggest international money-laundering case the country has known, AFP reported.
Gibraltar “is not cooperating in the fight against money laundering,“ public prosecutor Candido Conde-Pumpido said, hours after a Chilean lawyer became the ninth person to be remanded in custody in the glitzy resort of Marbella on suspicion of masterminding the 600-million-euro operation.
“It’s worrying,“ Conde-Pumpido told Punto Radio, stressing that “political action“ was needed to crack down on tax havens such as Gibraltar, a British possession on Spain’s Mediterranean south coast. “There is no sense in the existence of enclaves which serve as a platform for laundering,“ Conde-Pumpido said.
The Gibraltar government reacted angrily to Conde-Pumpido’s comments. “The Gibraltar government notes with surprise the statement attributed to the Spanish attorney general that Gibraltar does not cooperate in the fight against money laundering. If that statement has been made it is false,“ a government statement statement read.
Insisting that Gibraltar’s anti-money laundering legislation “complies with all European and international agreements,“ the statement added that if the comments attributed to Conde-Pumpido were confirmed “the Gibraltar government will lodge a protest with the Spanish government.“