LONDON: Banque Saudi Fransi shares fell by 3.1 percent on Sunday after a rise in impairments led to a drop in profits.
The increase in impairments was the main factor in a 6.4 percent fall in profit last year to SR3.31 billion ($882.56 million), the Riyadh-based lender said in a filing to the Tadawul.
Overall operating expenses spiked by more than 14 percent last year. “This increase in total operating expenses was primarily due to higher impairment charge for credit losses and for other financial assets,” the bank said in the statement.
However, the credit losses were partially offset by a reduction in other operating expenses at the bank, including rent, salaries and administrative costs.
Impairments for credit losses jumped by 69.5 percent over the quarter to SR878 million. The increase was even more pronounced over the year as total impairments rose by more than 80 percent to SR1.2 billion.
While successive US interest rate rises have helped regional lenders boost their interest income on loans in the past year, they are also coming under pressure from a weaker oil price and regional economic slowdown that is hurting many of their customers.
A wave of banking sector consolidation is underway in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia as lenders seek to trim costs
in response to changing economic realities.
Saudi Arabia’s biggest lender, National Commercial Bank, revealed in December that it was in takeover talks with Riyad Bank.
Meanwhile, in the UAE, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Union National Bank and Al Hilal Bank have also agreed a three-way merger, creating the third-largest bank in the country.
Despite the tougher economic conditions across the region, some analysts remain upbeat on the performance of the banking sector in Saudi Arabia.
“The challenges for Saudi banks in 2019 include growing loan books outside of retail mortgages; containing any increase in cost of funds if oil prices remain weak; driving cost efficiency through digitization; and countering competition from digital-payment platforms,” Aqib Mehboob, an analyst at Saudi Fransi Capital in Riyadh, told Bloomberg last month.
“The SABB-Alawwal merger and potential NCB and Riyad Bank merger may drive other banks to evaluate opportunities to gain scale,” he said.
Saudi Fransi hit by impairment rise
Saudi Fransi hit by impairment rise
Chad votes in first Sahel presidential poll since wave of coups
- Monday's vote pits military ruler Mahamat Idriss against his prime minister Succes Masra, previously a political opponent who fled into exile in 2022 but was allowed back a year later
N’DJAMENA: Chadians go to the polls on Monday three years after their military leader seized power, in the first presidential election in Africa’s Sahel region since a wave of coups.
Analysts say Mahamat Idriss Deby, who seized power the day rebels killed his long-ruling father Idriss Deby in April 2021, is most likely to win, although his chief opponent has been drawing larger-than-expected crowds on the campaign trail.
Deby has promised to bolster security, strengthen the rule of law and increase electricity production.
The vote coincides with a temporary withdrawal of US troops from Chad, an important Western ally in a region of West and Central Africa courted by Russia and wracked by jihadism.
Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 5 p.m., with some 8.5 million people registered to vote.
Soldiers began early voting on Sunday.
Provisional results are expected by May 21 and final results by June 5. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the votes, a run-off will be held on June 22.
Since replacing his father at the helm of the oil-producing Central African country, Deby has remained close with former colonial power and longtime ally France.
While other junta-ruled Sahel countries including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have told Paris and other Western powers to withdraw and turned to Moscow for support, Chad remains the last Sahel state with a substantial French military presence.
The US, however, announced a temporary withdrawal of at least some troops last month, saying it would continue with a review of security operations after the election.
Opposition concerns
Monday’s vote pits Deby against his prime minister Succes Masra, previously a political opponent who fled into exile in 2022 but was allowed back a year later. Also running are former prime minister Albert Pahimi Padacke and seven other candidates.
Yaya Dillo, an opposition politician who had been expected to run against Deby despite coming from the same clan, was shot and killed in the capital N’Djamena on Feb. 28, the day the election date was announced.
Padacke has accused Masra of collaborating with Deby. But Masra has attracted large crowds to his own rallies.
Some opposition members and civil society groups have called for a boycott, citing concerns about possible vote-rigging.
That has raised fears of potential violence.
“This presidential election is of capital importance for the country because an entire people aspires for change,” said Baniara Yoyana, a former minister and magistrate.
“The process must be conducted with transparency to avoid any risk of confrontation.”
One Deby supporter, however, said he expected no problems.
“We want the election to go well and peacefully,” said Abdelkhader Sougui, a 28-year-old student.
“My wish is to go out and vote the morning of May 6 to confirm our victory... in the first round.”
’Everybody is vulnerable’: Fake US school audio stokes AI alarm
- The clip, which left administrators of Pikesville High School fielding a flood of angry calls and threats, underscores the ease with which widely available AI and editing tools can be misused to impersonate celebrities and everyday citizens alike
WASHINGTON: A fabricated audio clip of a US high school principal prompted a torrent of outrage, leaving him battling allegations of racism and anti-Semitism in a case that has sparked new alarm about AI manipulation.
Police charged a disgruntled staff member at the Maryland school with manufacturing the recording that surfaced in January — purportedly of principal Eric Eiswert ranting against Jews and “ungrateful Black kids” — using artificial intelligence.
The clip, which left administrators of Pikesville High School fielding a flood of angry calls and threats, underscores the ease with which widely available AI and editing tools can be misused to impersonate celebrities and everyday citizens alike.
In a year of major elections globally, including in the United States, the episode also demonstrates the perils of realistic deepfakes as the law plays catch-up.
“You need one image to put a person into a video, you need 30 seconds of audio to clone somebody’s voice,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told AFP.
“There’s almost nothing you can do unless you hide under a rock.
“The threat vector has gone from the Joe Bidens and the Taylor Swifts of the world to high school principals, 15-year-olds, reporters, lawyers, bosses, grandmothers. Everybody is now vulnerable.”
After the official probe, the school’s athletic director, Dazhon Darien, 31, was arrested late last month over the clip.
Charging documents say staffers at Pikesville High School felt unsafe after the audio emerged. Teachers worried the campus was bugged with recording devices while abusive messages lit up Eiswert’s social media.
The “world would be a better place if you were on the other side of the dirt,” one X user wrote to Eiswert.
Eiswert, who did not respond to AFP’s request for comment, was placed on leave by the school and needed security at his home.
When the recording hit social media in January, boosted by a popular Instagram account whose posts drew thousands of comments, the crisis thrust the school into the national spotlight.
The audio was amplified by activist DeRay McKesson, who demanded Eiswert’s firing to his nearly one million followers on X. When the charges surfaced, he conceded he had been fooled.
“I continue to be concerned about the damage these actions have caused,” said Billy Burke, executive director of the union representing Eiswert, referring to the recording.
The manipulation comes as multiple US schools have struggled to contain AI-enabled deepfake pornography, leading to harassment of students amid a lack of federal legislation.
Scott Shellenberger, the Baltimore County state’s attorney, said in a press conference the Pikesville incident highlights the need to “bring the law up to date with the technology.”
His office is prosecuting Darien on four charges, including disturbing school activities.
Investigators tied the audio to the athletic director in part by connecting him to the email address that initially distributed it.
Police say the alleged smear-job came in retaliation for a probe Eiswert opened in December into whether Darien authorized an illegitimate payment to a coach who was also his roommate.
Darien made searches for AI tools via the school’s network before the audio came out, and he had been using “large language models,” according to the charging documents.
A University of Colorado professor who analyzed the audio for police concluded it “contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact.”
Investigators also consulted Farid, writing that the California expert found it was “manipulated, and multiple recordings were spliced together using unknown software.”
AI-generated content — and particularly audio, which experts say is particularly difficult to spot — sparked national alarm in January when a fake robocall posing as Biden urged New Hampshire residents not to vote in the state’s primary.
“It impacts everything from entire economies, to democracies, to the high school principal,” Farid said of the technology’s misuse.
Eiswert’s case has been a wake-up call in Pikesville, revealing how disinformation can roil even “a very tight-knit community,” said Parker Bratton, the school’s golf coach.
“There’s one president. There’s a million principals. People are like: ‘What does this mean for me? What are the potential consequences for me when someone just decides they want to end my career?’“
“We’re never going to be able to escape this story.”
Exiled Russian historian rallies fellow emigrants in dark times
- Tamara Eidelman is part of a group of exiled anti-war Russian public intellectuals and cultural figures who are rebuilding their careers abroad
- More than 800,000 Russians are estimated to have left the country in just the past two years after Russia invaded Ukraine
WASHINGTON: Russian dissident historian Tamara Eidelman was on vacation in Greece when Moscow’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022 and she realized that she would not be going back to her home country.
With her single suitcase, Eidelman, 65, flew to Portugal, where her daughter had been living, and began a new life in exile.
“I am operating under the assumption that I will not return. I am building my life in Portugal,” Eidelman, who has over 1.6 million followers on her history channel on YouTube, told AFP. “I want to come back... but if I sit every day thinking ‘When will it finally happen?’ I will go mad.”
Eidelman, who was declared a “foreign agent” by the government in Moscow, is part of a group of exiled anti-war Russian public intellectuals and cultural figures who are rebuilding their careers abroad.
While they cater to a large diaspora — more than 800,000 Russians are estimated to have left the country in just the past two years — unlike the previous waves of emigration from Russia’s calamities, they are able to continue speaking to those who stayed via social media, despite growing government restrictions.
“I think it’s one of the advantages of today’s emigration, if there can be any advantages, that our ties with our homeland have not been ruptured so drastically,” Eidelman, who wore a pin in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on her black blouse, said before a lecture in a community center outside Washington.
“Today there is an opportunity to exchange ideas. And, despite all the bans, inside Russia you can still access what is being done by those who emigrated. It is extremely valuable, it must be used and cherished.”
While exiles are unlikely to have a significant impact on political life inside Russia, “they can be the keepers of ideas, the centers of expertise and civic education,” according to Alexander Morozov, a political analyst and lecturer at Charles University in Prague.
When political change occurs, “Those who have retained trust and their symbolic capital can play a role in Russia’s renewal,” he wrote in a recent paper.
During her first few months in Portugal, Eidelman, who worked as a history teacher at a prestigious Moscow school for more than 30 years before becoming an editor, blogger and public speaker, kept herself busy looking for a place to live, reassembling her YouTube team and signing up for Portuguese lessons.
But she would catch herself thinking she was there on a brief visit and that she needed to buy a bottle of Port wine to bring back to Moscow to her mother and friends. Then it hit her.
“I felt a tremendous weight pressing on me when things had settled down a little and I realized that I am going to be in this wonderful, beautiful country for a long time,” she said. “Of course, (President Vladimir Putin’s) regime will collapse, but I don’t know if I will be around to see it.”
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Eidelman’s YouTube channel has ballooned from some 500,000 followers to 1.63 million and a team of 30 people, with lectures on Russian, Ukrainian and world history — as well as a special presentation on Putin’s assault on democracy, which she delivered in a T-shirt that read “No Putin No War.”
“I want to express my unconditional support for Ukraine in this war and I believe that all its territories, including Crimea, must be returned to it,” Eidelman told AFP, referring to the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
During her lecture in an auditorium of several hundred Russian speakers titled “The Judgment of History,” Eidelman examined the painful questions of countries’ and societies’ culpability and responsibility for crimes from ancient Greece to Nazi Germany — with the clear undertone of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Prosecuting those who committed direct crimes against Ukraine will not be enough, Eidelman suggested in her interview with AFP.
“I believe that there cannot be collective responsibility, that a whole people cannot be guilty,” she told AFP. “But at the same time, there must be... moral responsibility, responsibility before one’s conscience.”
Alina, a 39-year-old Russia-born quality control manager drove more than eight hours to Washington from the southern US state of Tennessee with her husband and two children to hear Eidelman speak.
To Alina, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “a crime against a neighboring country, but it’s also a crime against my own country because crimes are being committed in the name of people like me, who don’t agree with it.”
In these tragic times, Eidelman’s talk was a breath of fresh air, Alina said.
“When I listen to her lectures, I believe that there is — if not hope, then at least some light ahead for you to follow,” she said. “You get the feeling that you are not alone in all of this, even though physically you live apart from everyone.”
md/bgs/caw
Trump says Biden administration uses ‘Gestapo’ tactics: US media
- The “Gestapo” comment came as the campaign has begun heating up, and it follows several other Trump remarks that critics have said are dangerously inflammatory, including calling political rivals “vermin” and comparing immigrants to “animals”
WASHINGTON: Former president Donald Trump has sharpened his allegation that his Democratic successor has weaponized the US justice system against him, comparing Joe Biden’s tactics to those of Hitler’s Gestapo, American media reported Sunday.
The Republican 2024 presidential candidate made the remark during a private meeting Saturday with top party leaders and wealthy donors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to a recording provided to US media by one donor.
In a 90-minute speech, Trump accused the Democrats of “running a Gestapo administration,” referring to the secret police force in Nazi Germany. “It’s the only way they’re going to win,” he said.
The “Gestapo” comment came as the campaign has begun heating up, and it follows several other Trump remarks that critics have said are dangerously inflammatory, including calling political rivals “vermin” and comparing immigrants to “animals.”
His comments in Mar-a-Lago brought loud applause from the audience, which included a number of potential vice presidential picks, according to Politico.
He again lashed out at the prosecutors who have brought four separate court cases against him, including the hush-money trial now taking place in New York.
Trump denounced what he claimed was a “witch hunt” hatched by the Democratic administration to eliminate his key presidential rival.
The White House, which has denied any involvement in the legal cases, denounced Trump’s comments on Sunday.
“Instead of echoing the appalling rhetoric of fascists, lunching with Neo Nazis, and fanning debunked conspiracy theories that have cost brave police officers their lives, President Biden is bringing the American people together around our shared democratic values and the rule of law,” spokesman Andrew Bates said.
Biden’s campaign also responded, saying the Republican’s angry remarks confirmed “what we already knew: Trump’s campaign is about him. His fury, his revenge, his lies, and his retribution.”
Israel attacks Rafah after Hamas claims responsibility for deadly rocket attack
- Israel has killed more than 34,600 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry
CAIRO: Three Israeli soldiers were killed in a rocket attack claimed by Hamas armed wing, near the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, where Palestinian health officials said at least 19 people were killed by Israeli fire on Sunday.
Hamas's armed wing claimed responsibility on Sunday for an attack on the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza that Israel said killed three of its soldiers.
Israel's military said 10 projectiles were launched from Rafah in southern Gaza towards the area of the crossing, which it said was now closed to aid trucks going into the coastal enclave. Other crossings remained open.
Hamas' armed wing said it fired rockets at an Israeli army base by the crossing, but did not confirm where it fired them from. Hamas media quoted a source close to the group as saying the commercial crossing was not the target.
More than a million Palestinians are sheltering in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
Shortly after the Hamas attack, an Israeli airstrike hit a house in Rafah killing three people and wounding several others, Palestinian medics said.
The Israeli military confirmed the counter-strike, saying it struck the launcher from which the Hamas projectiles were fired, as well as a nearby "military structure".
"The launches carried out by Hamas adjacent to the Rafah Crossing ... are a clear example of the terrorist organisation's systematic exploitation of humanitarian facilities and spaces, and their continued use of the Gazan civilian population as human shields," it said.
Hamas denies it uses civilians as human shields.
Just before midnight, an Israeli air strike killed nine Palestinians, including a baby, in another house in Rafah, Gaza health officials said. They said the new strike increased the death toll on Sunday to at least 19 people.
Israel has vowed to enter the southern Gaza city and flush out Hamas forces there, but has faced mounting pressure to hold fire as the operation could derail fragile humanitarian efforts in Gaza and endanger many more lives.
Sunday's attack on the crossing came as hopes dimmed for ceasefire talks under way in Cairo.
The war began after Hamas stunned Israel with a cross-border raid on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 people were killed and 252 hostages taken, according to Israeli tallies.
More than 34,600 Palestinians have been killed, 29 of them in the past 24 hours, and more than 77,000 have been wounded in Israel's assault, according to Gaza's health ministry.
