Summit Notebook

Moscow: The least worst place for your money

   Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital was a big backer of Moscow’s ambition to become a major emerging-markets financial centre, a bridge between European and Asian capital, a rival to Dubai.

    It not only trumpeted the idea, but was one of the first big local firms to take out offices in a sleek glass skyscraper by the Moscow River, surrounded by foundation pits and towers of naked steel girders that were to become Moscow’s Canary Wharf.

Enviro-boxer Britain needs to spend more on climate cure

Scientists may face an uphill battle in trying to warn the world about the looming perils of global warming, but one of Britain’s top academics wouldn’t trade places with the politicians tasked with negotiating a new global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“Although the science (of climate change) is difficult and still uncertain, it’s a doddle compared to the politics,” said Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, Britain’s science academy.

Thousands of international delegates will convene at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December. All early indications suggest those talks, seen as critical to agreeing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol after it expires in 2012, will be anything but a cake walk.

That said, Rees thinks UK policymakers have done a good job so far.

“We must give (the UK) government credit for its leadership in this area, going back to the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 when climate change was pushed up the agenda,” Rees said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit this week.

“The UK punches above its weight in the debate on climate change even though we only produce 2% of the world’s emissions,” said Rees, likening Britain to some sort of environmental boxer.

Rees thinks that because the UK has the high-tech know-how, it should strive to provide more than 2% of the solution to the climate problem by upping investment technologies to help replace fossil fuel burning.

Japan eyes UK takeover rules

Japan’s takeover rules are destined to be shaken up — but probably not for some time.

The government wants to adopt Britain’s takeover rules rather than base policy on the U.S. model.

Hiroaki Niihara, director of the corporate system division at the Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry, told the Reuters Japan Investment Summit that current rules make it too easy to defend against approaches and are bad news for minority shareholders.

A “poison pill” takeover defence by Bull-Dog Sauce Co in 2007 showed up shortcomings, he said.

But change will take time. METI has been in talks with Britain’s Takeover Panel, the body that oversees Britain’s takeover policies, whose members are market practioners.

The Panel recently delivered 10 boxes of documents detailing how its oversight works to versight to METI, and getting to grips with the system is just the start of the process of change.

No more green shoots, but lots of bottoms

From the start, “green shoots of recovery” was not necessarily the British government’s wisest choice of words and after a few months of being on everyone’s lips, has given way to a more lowly metaphor. Business Minister Baroness Vadera raised the hackles of the political opposition in January when she spotted “a few green shoots” on a day of large-scale job losses and collapsing share prices. Evidence of economic revival is still elusive, but there are ever louder hints that we have at least seen the worst — or bottomed, to use the mot du jour. Bottom as a noun and a verb was widely brandished by speakers attending Reuters Global Energy Summit this week, who based on their analysis on a slight increase in available credit, a tentative pick up in energy demand and rising commodity prices. OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri has an interest in spotting the kind of confidence that has driven oil prices up from a low below $35 a barrel in December to almost double that. “I have no doubt that the recession has bottomed out, but is it a V shape or a U shape?” he asked during a Reuters summit session. Others were less convinced and the most bearish of them all was a representative of the very oversupplied tanker market, where freight rates have sunk to their lowest levels in decades, with not a green shoot in sight. “We have seen lower than the bottom,” said Erik Ranheim, a manager at oil tanker association Intertanko.