Infrastructure firm Welspun Enterprises Ltd (WEL) today announced acquisition of 49 per cent stake in two road projects of NHAI from MBL Group for Rs 23 crore. The company also said that its board has approved the proposal of its subsidiary – Welspun Financial Services Limited (WFSL)- to apply to RBI for NBFC licence. “WEL has agreed to acquire 49 per cent stake in two NHAI Hybrid Annuity Model (HAM) projects from MBL Group, subject to necessary approvals and statutory compliances. WEL will be the sponsor to these two projects, thus expanding its HAM project portfolio to three projects,” WEL said in a BSE filing.

Regulator Sebi will auction 16 properties owned by Sai Prasad Group in September for a total reserve price of over Rs 9 crore in order to recover funds worth thousands of crores raised by the Maharashtra-based group from public through illicit schemes. As part of the recovery proceedings, Sebi on September 4 will e-auction immovable properties of Sai Prasad Properties Ltd, Sai Prasad Foods Ltd and Sai Prasad Corporation Ltd. The properties to go under the hammer include land parcels, office premises, flats and commercial spaces across Maharashtra, Sebi said in an auction notice.

MUMBAI: For the first time, HDFC Bank has shrunk its ATM network by shutting down machines that were not seeing enough footfalls.

The bank has attributed this to a shift in customer behaviour from cash to electronic payments.

KOLKATA: An unexplained glitch in Air India's reservation system that triggered angry protests among passengers in Kolkata this weekend has the airline's commercial team on tenterhooks.

On Saturday, 194 passengers reported for Air India flight AI 731 from Kolkata to Guwahati when the Airbus A 319 aircraft had only 144 seats. Some airlines do resort to overbooking but never at this scale. While the 50 stranded passengers fumed and fretted, AI officials were left flummoxed at how it had happened.

SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft on Monday announced the end of days for its pioneering Paint application as it focuses on software for 3-D drawing.

Paint drawing and image processing software that made its debut in 1985 with the Windows operating system was among the applications listed as "removed or deprecated" in a Windows 10 Fall Creators Update set for release later this year.

Creating history, the NSE Nifty on Tuesday breached the 10,000 level for the first time while the BSE Sensex hit another record high of 32,374.30 in opening trade led by rally in metal, banking, realty and FMCG stocks.

The 50-issue Nifty breached the historic 10,000 level by gaining 44.90 points, or 0.45 percent, to trade at all-time high of 10,011.30, surpassing its previous intra-day high of 9,982.05 touched on Monday. Brokers said sentiment was upbeat on sustained capital inflows and widespread buying by retail investors, driven by strong earnings by some more bluechip companies.

A Taliban suicide bomber today struck a police team near residence-cum-office of Pakistan's Punjab province Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif here, killing at least 26 people, including policemen, and wounding 58 others.

Lahore police chief Capt (R) Amin Wains confirmed that it was a suicide attack and the "target was police".

Homegrown utility vehicles (UV) maker Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) has some new vehicle launches in the pipeline that may help the company to regain its market share. According to the company, a vehicle codenamed U321 MPV is scheduled for launch this year. Other news reports suggest that the company will be launching two more new UVs by the end of this financial year.

The U321 will be positioned below XUV 5OO in their product line up, and is expected to compete with the likes of Tata Hexa and Toyota Innova. The car is likely to use the same engines that power the XUV 5OO. Second, Mahindra is planning to launch a sports utility vehicle (SUV) based on Tivoli platform to rival the likes of premium SUVs like Toyota Fortuner and Ford Endeavour.

The country's crude oil output rose 0.24 per cent and natural gas production was up 4.04 per cent in the June quarter of 2017 due to a push from state-run companies like Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) and Oil India (OIL).

Cumulative crude oil production by ONGC in Q1 was 5,640.77 thousand metric tonne (tmt), which is 0.22 per cent lower than the period's target but 2.71 per cent higher than production during the year-ago period. OIL produced 839.86 tmt, about 5.22 per cent higher than the last year's corresponding period.

ITC has raised prices of select cigarette brands to pass on the 6-7 per cent hike in the additional cess on cigarettes.

Sameer Deshmukh, a research analyst with Reliance Securities, said the price hikes were 6-15 per cent across brands with the average hike coinciding with the 6-7 per cent rise in effective taxes under the goods and services tax.

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