Daily News Roundup - Jan 18 2011

Mahindra Group has announced its new brand position, "Rise", to project a single umbrella for all its segments. (BL)

Jindal Power, a unit of Jindal Steel & Power, plans to mop up Rs70bn via IPO in March-April. (BL)

JSW Steel plans to infuse Rs38bn in Ispat Industries over the next two to three years. (BS)



ONGC has suggested a fresh crude oil matrix-based subsidy sharing formula to the petroleum ministry. (BS)

ING Vysya Bank has raised term deposit rates across various maturity buckets by up to 1%. (BS)

Essar Oil has "re-engaged" in discussions to buy Royal Dutch Shell Plc's three European refineries, although refused to put a timeline for conclusion of the deal. (BS)

REpower Systems, subsidiary of Suzlon Energy, has bagged a contract for supplying 150 wind turbines to Canada-based Saint-Laurent Energies. (BS)

Essar Steel to formalise its partnership with Kobe of Japan into a JV agreement for producing auto grade steel at the Hazira plant in Gujarat. (FE)

Tata Communications has entered into an outsourcing agreement with Cananda-based Videotron under which the later will route the entire international voice traffic though the Tata group firm's network. (ET)

In a directive by US jury, Glenmark Pharma has been stopped from selling a copy of Abbott Laboratories’ hypertension drug, ‘Tarka’ . (BS)

With increase in rubber prices, JK Tyre has decided to hike price of its products by 2-4%. (ET)

Essar Oil plans a 35-day shutdown in May-June at its 280,000 bpd Vadinar refinery in western India to add new units for raising the plant's capacity to 360,000 bpd. (ET)

Triveni Engineering has signed an agreement with US-based Lufkin Industries Inc to extend its licensing agreement by another 12 years. (ET)

JSW Steel has bought assets of Bellary Steel for Rs2.1bn. (ET)

Tax authorities have asked Infosys Technologies, to fork over Rs4bn, refusing to acknowledge onshore services derogatorily called `body shopping’ as software exports. (ET)

VA Tech Wabag has entered into a joint venture agreement with Zawawi Trading Company LL.C in Oman to tap the operation and maintenance business. (BL)
Economy Snippets

Indirect tax collections were up 42.8% to Rs2.4tn in Apr-Dec, 2010 against Rs1.6tn in the corresponding period. (BS)

SEBI has strengthened the reporting process related to offshore derivative instrument and participatory note activity. (BL)

RBI has asked all non-banking finance companies to make a provision of 0.25% on standard assets. (BL)

Telecom ministry will look in to the process followed while the formulation of NTP '99 to come out with a New Telecom Policy 2011. (ET)

The labour ministry has refused to rethink its decision to pay a higher 9.5% interest rate on employees provident fund corpus this year. (ET)