Mumbai: Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) has pared its holdings in Tata group firms, fearing that a potentially long legal battle between Tata Sons Ltd and its ousted chairman Cyrus P. Mistry will erode its investments.

Foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) and mutual funds have been more optimistic, with the latter increasing their ownership in 12 Tata group firms and cutting their stake in seven.

New Delhi: Air India has shortlisted three consulting firms—McKinsey and Co., Bain and Co. and EY—for a project to draw up its business strategy for the coming years, said Ashwani Lohani, the state-run airline’s chairman and managing director.

The firms have been shortlisted out of several that made presentations after the airline floated a tender inviting proposals in October last year.

India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corp has received the first installment of $19 million from Venezuela’s state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela towards recovering pending dividend, a senior company official said. PDVSA and ONGC Videsh Ltd, the overseas investment of arm of state-run explorer ONGC, last year signed a deal allowing the Indian firm to get 17,000 barrels per day of oil to recover dues of about $540 million.

“PDVSA is marketing our share of oil. Every month we will get an installment,” N. K. Verma, managing director of ONGC Videsh told Reuters late on Monday. He said price of crude from San Cristobal project is market linked.

Swipe is all set to release its new smartphone Elite Power on January 31. The key highlight of this phone is its massive 4000mAh battery and its standby time of 240 hours or 15 hours of 3G talktime and 13 hours of Wi-Fi web browsing. Amongst other features, Swipe Power is a dual-SIM smartphone and it also supports 4G LTE. With various other compelling attributes to its list, Swipe Power is a must-buy for the millennial and heavy usage.

Idea Cellular’s share price surged nearly 30% intra-day on Monday after the telecom company said it was contemplating a merger with Vodafone India, the country’s second-largest mobile telephony player. The stock gained 25.9% before closing the session at Rs 97.95. This is the biggest single-day gain for the telecom player’s shares since its listing in 2007. The stock has risen by 44% in the last seven sessions on speculation it might consider a merger with Vodafone India.

KOLKATA: Coal India's unions are demanding a levy Rs 20 per tonne on the dry fuel to help the company's pension fund get enough cash. The state-run company is likely to send this proposal soon to the central government, sources said.

“We would want the Centre to impose a levy on each tonne of coal sold to save the pension fund. It would go into inflating the fund size and help reduce the large liability gap it is facing today,“ said DD Ramanandan, president of the All India Coal Workers' Federation.

US President Donald Trump is expected to sign a new executive order aimed at strangulating work-visa programmes, including the H1B and L1 visas used by Indian IT professionals, as part of a larger immigration reform effort, a top White House official has said.

The executive order drafted by the Trump Administration not only strangulates H-1B and L1 visas, but also increases inspector raj and ends employment authorisation cards to spouses on such work visas, which was recently introduced by the previous Obama Administration.

The government has moved the Supreme Court to impose a ban on 344 fixed dose drugs, an order that was set aside by the Delhi High Court.

The Delhi HC set aside a government notification on the issue which called for a ban on 344 fixed dose drugs citing health hazards of using them.

New York and British authorities slapped nearly $630 million (nearly Rs 4,191.23 crore) in fines on German banking giant Deutsche Bank over alleged money laundering in Russia, New York State's Department of Financial Services announced.

The scheme illegally moved $10 billion (nearly Rs 66527.5 crore) out of Russia, using so-called mirror trades among the bank's Moscow, London and New York offices, authorities said. The US Justice Department also is investigating the matter.

Facing criticism from the Election Commission (EC) for not allowing candidates contesting the coming Assembly polls to withdraw cash up to their legal limit, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday removed withdrawal restrictions on current, cash credit and overdraft accounts with immediate effect.

ATM withdrawal restrictions will also be eased from Wednesday, RBI said. A savings account holder may now withdraw up to Rs 24,000 at one go from ATMs. Earlier, the limit on such accounts was Rs 10,000 per day, with a weekly cap of Rs 24,000.

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