A Kazatomprom worker checks the radiation level of uranium oxide at the East Mynkuduk PV-19 uranium mine in southern Kazakhstan.

Astana, Kazakhstan, Dec. 26--Japan’s Kansai Electric Power Co. and trading house Sumitomo Corp. will tie up with Kazakhstan’s state-run energy company in uranium processing for nuclear power generation, an official said Wednesday.
The move is part of a wider effort by Asia’s largest economy to forge closer ties with uranium-rich Kazakhstan so as to reduce its dependence on increasingly expensive Middle East crude oil, AFP reported.
The Japanese firms will sign an agreement Wednesday with Kazatomprom with the aim of securing a stable supply of nuclear fuel, said Mitsuji Mori, a spokesman for Kansai Electric, which supplies power to a large swathe of western Japan.
Under the tie-up, state-owned Kazatomprom will handle the reconversion stage of the nuclear fuel cycle at a facility in Kazakhstan to turn enriched uranium into powder.
Kansai Electric and Sumitomo meanwhile will provide expertise and funding for necessary modifications of the plant, which is capable of producing roughly twice as much nuclear fuel as needed by Japan, Mori said.
No financial details were disclosed, but according to the Nikkei business daily the cost of upgrading the facility alone is expected to be 70-80 billion yen ($614-702 million).
International energy firms are vying to secure nuclear fuel amid growing energy demand, particularly in emerging economies such as China and India.
Japan, which has virtually no natural energy resources of its own, relies heavily on Middle East oil to power its economy, and has been seeking to diversify its sources of energy.
Japan’s Toshiba Corp. announced in August that it had agreed to sell 10 percent of US nuclear power plant maker Westinghouse to Kazatomprom for $540 million as part of a wider collaboration between the two firms.
That deal came a year after Junichiro Koizumi became the first Japanese prime minister to tour Central Asia, including a visit to Kazakhstan where he offered aid and discussed cooperation in the energy sector.

Elvira Nabiullina

MOSCOW, Dec. 26--Russia will become the world’s fifth largest economy by 2020, should its gross domestic product (GDP) keep an annual growth rate of 6 to 7 percent, said Russian Minister of Economic Development and Trade Elvira Nabiullina on Monday.
“If we maintain the GDP growth at 6 percent to 7 percent per year, we’ll join the group of the world’s five largest economies,“ the minister was quoted as saying by Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency.
Under a forecast drawn up by her ministry in November for Russia’s economic development until 2020, the country’s GDP is expected to exceed $5 trillion in 2020 given a foreign exchange rate of 30 rubles equivalent to 1 dollar.
The forecast also put Russia into the position of the world’s fifth largest economy measured by the GDP by 2020 while overtaking all the other European countries.
Russia’s GDP in 2007 is expected to reach $1.3 trillion, a surge of more than seven percent driven by growing household consumption and boosted business activities.
Meanwhile, Gazprom’s oil unit Gazprom Neft is one of two firms to have made an offer to buy a 50 percent stake in Tomskneft from state-controlled oil giant Rosneft, Russian news agencies reported on Tuesday.
“We have received two offers to buy Tomskneft, one of which is from Gazprom Neft“, said Anatoly Golomolzin, deputy head of the Russian financial regulator, cited by Ria Novosti agency. He did not name the second bidder.
Rosneft acquired Tomskneft in May for $6.8 billion (4.7 billion euros) during the break-up of privately-owned former oil major Yukos.
State-controlled Gazprom controls the largest proven gas reserves in the world and supplies about a quarter of the European Union’s gas.

TOKYO, Dec. 26-- A Japanese rail operator said Wednesday it plans to introduce the world’s fastest train by the 2025 financial year, a next-generation maglev built at a cost of $45 billion.
“Maglev“, or magnetically levitated, trains travel above ground through an electromagnetic pull. The only maglev train now in commercial operation is in Shanghai.
Central Japan Railway Co. plans to build a maglev linear-motor train between Tokyo and a to-be-determined area in central Japan at a cost of 5.1 trillion yen ($44.7 billion), a company spokesman was quoted by AFP as saying.
“It will be the fastest train ever--if it beats the one in Shanghai--with a velocity of about 500 kilometers (310 miles) per hour, traveling a distance of 290 kilometers,“ he said.
The Shanghai train, launched in 2002, travels at 430 kph for a 30.5 kilometer distance from Pudong Airport to the financial district, according to the Shanghai Maglev Transportation Development Co.’s website.
“JR Central’s magnetic-levitated train hit 581 kph in 2003 in a trial run on a test course in Japan’s central Yamanashi prefecture“, the spokesman said.
The company’s board approved the plan this week estimating an accumulative long-term debt of up to five trillion yen when the train goes into service in the financial year to March 2026.
The company projects the train will bring in five percent additional revenue in the first year, shrinking JR Central’s debt to the current level within eight years of operation, a statement said.
JR Central initially had waited on the plan in hopes of government subsidies.
“The reason why the plan has not moved a bit is because the government isn’t able to bankroll it,“ JR Central president Masayuki Matsumoto said, as quoted by the Nikkei business daily.

Oil prices of near $100 per barrel caused alarm in consuming countries in 2007 and analysts forecast another tense crude market next year with triple-figure records a real prospect.
Despite a murky outlook for the world economy, crude prices are seen settling at elevated levels, spelling more pain for consumers and a steady flow of petrodollars for the world’s oil exporters, AFP wrote.
From a low point of just below $50 per barrel in January, prices doubled in 2007, hitting $99.29 a barrel on November 21, an all-time record.
Oil forecasting is a notoriously difficult business, but few had expected such a run-up--apart from an analyst at investment bank Goldman Sachs who has achieved some fame for foreseeing early in 2005 a “super spike“ in prices to $105.
“People at the beginning of this year would never have dreamt that prices would have reached such exalted heights,“ said a London-based analyst for the Centre for Global Energy Studies, Leo Drollas.
Goldman Sachs, one of the most active banks in the energy market, raised its price forecasts for 2008 by $10 on Dec. 12, with average benchmark US prices now seen at $95. The price could reach $105 by the end of 2008, it said.
The CGES sees an average of about $90 in the first half of the year and Drollas said a spike to $100 was a possibility, above all if a cold northern hemisphere winter increased demand for heating fuel.
“There are conditions in which we would see well over $100 per barrel, such as a cool winter, tightness of OPEC supplies, or non-OPEC supply not growing as much as predicted,“ he said.
World oil prices on Monday traded above $94 a barrel ahead of the Christmas holiday, underpinned by generally strong US economic data suggesting that energy demand in the world’s largest consumer may not weaken as much as anticipated.
A US report showed that consumers shook off a slump in housing and tight credit and boosted spending by a stronger-than-anticipated 1.1 percent in November.
The Commerce Department report also showed that personal incomes rose 0.4 percent, a notch weaker than forecast.
Prices are also being supported at the moment by lingering concerns about supply during the northern hemisphere winter.
The United States has nonetheless been battling crises on two fronts. In the housing sector, prices are falling sharply and an increasing number of people are defaulting on home loans.
That in turn has led to tightening corporate credit conditions, notably among banks holding securities backed by US home mortgages.
Despite prospects for slower growth, Analysts at investment bank Merrill Lynch earlier this month pointed to upside risks to oil prices in early 2008.
“We start 2008 with the lowest OECD industry stocks recorded in four years, resulting in upside risks to near-term prices, particularly in the event of a colder-than-normal northern hemisphere winter,“ they said, upping their 2008 average price forecast to $82.
The OECD area includes the 30 industrialized member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The 13-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is the only player in the oil industry capable of bringing down prices, but the group shrugged off calls for more crude at a December meeting in Abu Dhabi.
It is held responsible by many for the surge in prices in 2007 by restricting supplies to deliberately take down stock levels in industrialized countries.
“OPEC has not been pumping enough. It’s as simple as that,“ said Drollas.
Kirsch at PFC said 2007 was the year of “the reemergence of OPEC“ after many had said the influence of the organization, which pumps 40 percent of world oil, had waned. He also said the “financialization of oil,“ or the use of oil as an investment product for speculators and even pension funds, was a key theme of 2007 that was set to continue in 2008. “It started late last year. We’re now seeing different types of investors“, he said.
“Before it was primarily hedge funds, now we’re seeing pension funds, which are very conservative investors, taking long-term positions in oil as part of a larger portfolio strategy.“
OPEC members have railed against the role of “speculative“ money, which they blame for volatility and high prices.

LONDON, Dec. 26--The final-salary pension schemes of the UK’s 100 largest companies will show an aggregate surplus of 15 billion pounds ($29.74 billion) at the end of 2007, a UK consulting firm, Deloitte said on Wednesday.
This figure reflects an improvement of more than 55 billion pounds during the course of the year, Deloitte was quoted by Reuters as saying.
A combination of relatively healthy investment returns of around 3.5 percent over the year, billions of pounds being pumped into pension schemes by employers and the falling price of corporate bonds which are used to measure company pension liabilities are responsible for the surplus, said Deloitte.
Critics argue the improvements are partly an illusion, because they are primarily driven by the benchmark having been lowered rather than a fundamental improvement in the financial strength of these schemes.
The subprime mortgage crisis has caused a tumbling in the price of AA-rated corporate bonds, which firms use as the benchmark measure for valuing their pension liabilities.
The surplus will rise to 30 billion by the end of 2008, Deloitte predicts, if companies’ own expectations for 2008 stock market performance are proven correct.
This is likely to prompt an increase in the number of firms who seek to offload their pension liabilities in once-for-all deals with insurers such as Paternoster or specialist buyout firms such as Pension Corporation.
“Over 2008 companies will be looking to solve their pension problems for good,“ said David Robbins, a pensions partner at Deloitte.
Final-salary pensions, which guarantee members a retirement income linked to their pay, have become a major headache to many firms, which saw their schemes plunge deep into the red due to the bear market in equities in the early 2000s, contribution holidays and growing life expectancy.
Demands by the pension trustees of Sainsburys for a major cash injection into their scheme have helped derail two takeover attempts for the grocery firm, while attempts by airport operator BAA to close its final-salary scheme prompted workers to vote to strike.

DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 26--The booming economy of the United Arab Emirates attracted $18.7 billion in foreign direct investments in 2006, up 10.8 percent from the previous year, AFP reported.
The inflows increased from 61.91 billion dirhams ($16.86 billion) in 2005 to 68.63 billion dirhams ($18.7 billion) in 2006, newspapers quoted Economy Minister Sheikha Lubna al-Qassemi as saying. She said a survey conducted by the ministry, in coordination with UN agencies, found that financial services led the economic sectors in attracting 34.4 percent of investment, followed by construction at 29 percent, while manufacturing received 10.1 percent. Qassemi did not provide any figures for 2007.
The booming emirate of Dubai, which is seeking to establish itself as a business and tourism regional hub, grabbed the lion’s share of foreign investment in 2006 at 62 percent, followed by the wealthy capital, Abu Dhabi, at 24 percent.
The UAE economy grew 9.4 percent in real terms in 2006, according to data provided by the International Monetary Fund.

Picture shows workers at a wheel hub production line of the Lifan-Vietnam Motorcycle Manufacturer in Hung Yen, Vietnam.

HANOI, Vietnam,
Dec. 26--Vietnam’s economy grew by 8.4 percent this year, the fastest expansion in the last 10 years, and inflation is estimated at 8.3 percent, according to government figures released Tuesday.
Export revenues have earned the country an estimated $48.3 billion in 2007, the Vietnamese government said on its website, AP wrote.
The high inflation was attributed to recent price hikes on major products, including food, gasoline and construction materials, the report said.
Vietnam had set a 8.5 percent gross domestic product growth target for 2007 and has tried to keep the inflation rate below that figure. It has set a 9 percent economic growth target for 2008.
Foreign investment pledges in Vietnam have surged to $20.25 billion (14.08 billion euros) in 2007, up 68.7 percent from the same period last year.
Last year, Vietnam attracted $12 billion of foreign direct investment, the highest amount since the country began accepting foreign investment in 1998.
Vietnam’s economy has grown at an average rate of nearly 8 percent for the past decade, one of the highest rates in the world. Last year, the country’s economy expanded by 8.2 percent.