Trading in Dexia shares suspended

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
6 October 2011 Last updated at 17:01 GMT Dexia is reported to be selling its Luxembourg business to Qatar for 900m euros Trading of shares in Dexia has been halted by the Euronext stock exchange.

The stop was requested by the Belgian regulator until the troubled Franco-Belgian bank could provide details of a planned sale of its Luxembourg unit.

Its shares had fallen 17.3% during the day up until trading was suspended.

Meanwhile, the French and Belgian governments are negotiating a break-up of the bank - and how to share the cost of rescuing it between them - with a decision expected before the weekend.

Qataris

Dexia has confirmed it is in "exclusive negotiations" with a group of international investors to dispose of Dexia Banque Internationale a Luxembourg (BIL).

The subsidiary employs about 5,500 staff worldwide, 3,700 of whom are based in Luxembourg.

It runs a 40-branch retail network in the country, as well as offering private banking and asset management services.

Continue reading the main story The key buyer is reported to be the Qatari Investment Authority, the country's sovereign wealth fund.

Reports say it may pay 900m euros ($1.2bn, ￡785m) for control of the Dexia unit.

It follows an announcement in August that the Qataris were to become a major shareholder in the merger of two Greek lenders, Alpha Bank and EFG Eurobank.

The government of Luxembourg is also in talks to buy a minority stake. The country's finance minister, Luc Frieden, said he expects discussions to be completed by the end of the month.

Break-up

Dexia is facing its second rescue in three years because of the eurozone debt crisis.

The firm has 3.4bn euros ($4.5bn, ￡2.9bn) of exposure to Greek government bonds, and about four times that amount to Italian sovereign debt.

Ratings agency Moody's put the lender on review for a credit score downgrade on Monday. It said the bank was finding it harder to borrow from the markets.

The news led to a sell-off of Dexia's shares, prompting France and Belgium to announce they would prevent its collapse.

The governments are expected to pool its most risky assets into a "bad bank" and force it to sell off units that provide vital services, including a French division that specialises in lending to local authorities.

Belgium's Prime Minister said the burden must be divided fairly.

Yves Leterme told RTL radio: "This is a very sensitive and crucial part of the negotiations, an equitable split of the costs."

The two countries are expected to finalise the plan before the weekend.

Dexia's board says it intends to meet in Paris on Saturday to vote on the break-up.

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Scientist of the Arctic suspended on "integrity matters"

The official offshore oil tax in Alaska, he said that a scientist in the upper Arctic was suspended due to "problems of integrity" outside of his work in polar bears.

Charles Monnett, a biologist at wildlife of U.S. Government that first exposed to the threat of polar bears that raises the melting ice of the sea, he was suspended on 18 July.

His team's defense, which was not informed of the specific charges against Monnett - said that suspension may be linked to an investigation of months of possible scientific misconduct in his work of polar bears.

But Michael Bromwich, who heads the Government agency where she works Monnett, told staff in an e-mail that the suspension was due to totally different integrity issues that came to light during the course of the investigation.

Earlier, an official of the Bureau of ocean energy management implementation and regulation of the Bromwich told The Guardian, in an e-mail: "Agency placed Mr Monnett administrative leave for reasons that have nothing to do with scientific integrity". The Agency said the suspension of the Monnett had nothing to do with his work on polar bears.

Also denied suggestions that Monnett, which managed about $ 50 million (￡ 30. 5 m) in research projects of the Government in the Arctic, was being marginalized to speed up the way for offshore oil drilling.

Suspension of the Monnett has produced very different reactions. Fox television commentators cite the incident to try to discredit the science on climate change.

The Monnett defenders say he is subject to a smear campaign.

Jeff Ruch of public employees for environmental responsibility, which is to serve the legal team of the Monnett, suggested the work of the Monnett placed under a microscope at the behest of the oil companies to drill in the Arctic.

Ruch, "I think it is an excuse to close the store of science", said on Friday.

Documents suggest the investigators are reviewing Monnett research methods, as well as the importance it attaches to its discovery of polar bears in the Arctic channels in 2004.

But the investigators of the Office of the inspector general in the Department of the interior of United States, said during a formal interview last February, that they were impacting its methodology, displays a transcript of the session. "Basically wrong numbers, calculation errors," said one of the researchers, Eric may, Monnett during the formal interview.Monnett protested. "It is not scientific misconduct." If "nothing is sloppy, the transcript quotes him as saying.Scientific misconduct suggests that we did something deliberately to deceive or change it. We are sure that I do not see any indication of that in what you are asking me about. "

Monnett was on a flight from research whale monitoring in 2004 when he and a colleague, Jeff Gleason, saw four dead polar bears floating in the water after a storm. It was that first scientists of the Government time had recorded deaths by drowning polar bears, Monnett told investigators.

He and Gleason published his observations in 2006 in the journal Polar biology. The paper used the number of corpses seen polar bears on the flight to suggest 25% of the bears had drowned swimming between solid sheets of ice. They wrote: "Drowning deaths of polar bears may increase in future if it continues the observed trend of regression of ice or over open water sessions."

Monnett told investigators that he was cautious in his framing of the polar bear event: in view of the prevailing views of the then administration of George Bush.

"We are working for an agency that, above all, very hostile to the concept of climate change, which is hostile to the idea that had effects in all that we do nothing," is quoted as saying. Elsewhere in the interview transcripts, researchers ask Monnett how he was able to clearly identify the dead polar bears from the air, how their calculations are carried out and how it could be some of those deaths did not occur on a regular basis.

In his interview with Gleason, carried out in January, the researchers were methods for identifying and registering animals. They pointed out that the scientists took photos of only one of the dead polar bears. Monnett told investigators that he had spoken to a colleague who had overseen the whale survey flights from 1987 to 2003. The colleague allegedly told Monnett that he did not remember see polar bears killed on these trips. Gleason, in his interview, said researchers who had consulted a database that they did not show any records of drowning polar bears 30 years.

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