For example, Mitsubishi Group has invested US$290 million (Bt9.7 billion) in a joint venture with Vietnam’s Bitexco to develop the Manor Central Park here.

In the first stage of cooperation, the two sides agreed to develop 240 low-rise buildings and two high-rise buildings with 1,036 apartments.

Last September, Kajima Overseas Asia spent $500 million to establish the Indochina Kajima Development joint venture with Indochina Capital. They plan to invest in Vietnam’s real estate market in the next 10 years.

More recently, Sanyo Home invested in the field via cooperation with Tien Phat under the Hoa Binh property business and construction joint stock company to invest in the Ascent Lakeside project in Ho Chi Minh City.

Sumitomo will invest in the Nhat Tan-Noi Bai urban area here along with Vietnam’s BRG Group.

Toshihiko Muneyoshi, president of the investment fund Creed Group, said that with a population exceeding 93 million people, increasing incomes and rapid urbanisation, the demand for houses among young customers is huge.

Each year, 50,000-60,000 new households are expected to be built in Hanoi and HCM City, he said, adding that the fund will focus on the middle-range segment and seek more local partners.

Japanese investors have secured their position in Vietnam in recent years with 3,411 projects worth near?ly $44 billion.

According to the Foreign Investment Agency under the Ministry of Planning and Investment, in the first six months of this year, Japan rose to first position among 94 countries and territories with investment projects in Vietnam.

It is the latest company in the marine sector to suffer the savage fallout of protracted low oil prices.

The loss-making company had run up 1.84 billion ringgit (Bt14.3 billion) of outstanding debts at the end of March, versus a cash balance of 116 million ringgit.

Nam Cheong used to build offshore support vessels (OSVs) speculatively in the days of peak oil, betting orders would roll in as long as OSVs were in short supply.

Now, three years into the oil price rout, buyers have disappeared and Nam Cheong is stuck with about 74 vessels at different stages of construction. Most of these vessels had been subcontracted to shipyards in China.

The firm said it is trying to cancel or delay delivery of the vessels. Under liquidation, however, its deposits would be forfeited and the unbilled contract sum of about US$770 million (S$1.05 billion) would be payable immediately.

To avoid liquidation, Nam Cheong intends to put in a scheme of arrangement with all bank lenders and bond holders under court supervision where creditors vote as a group on the settlement.

The restructuring plan itself is thin on details. Nam Cheong plans to sell assets to repay its secured bank lenders as much as it can. For the rest of its debts, it is seeking a moratorium on principal repayments and asking creditors to accept a haircut as well as a conversion of their debt into equity.

Bond holders would also be paid all of the $19.5 million in the firm’s Interest Service Reserve Accounts, equal to two coupons.

Observers say it will be a struggle for Nam Cheong to survive. Even with the standstill on its bonds and bank debt, its obligations to shipyards are huge. By industry standards, the sum borrowed from banks typically makes up 20 per cent of the down payment for the contracted vessels. Unless Nam Cheong’s bankers want to fork out much more than they are already owed to bail it out, it is hard to see how the obligations can be cleared.

The OSV market is also dismal. At end May, 1,445 OSVs were idle out of a global fleet of 3,500, said David Palmer, chief executive of Pareto Securities Asia. Official statistics reported 363 units in the order book to be delivered – 90 per cent of which would come from Asian yards – some of which would never be delivered, he added.

When will the oil industry bloodbath end? Palmer noted the offshore working rig count rose in May for the first time since July 2014. OSV utilisations have risen, although rates are yet to follow.

“There are some green shoots, but whether it is tipping the dial enough is another point,” he said.

Nam Cheong’s three tranches of outstanding bonds – $90 million due on August 28, $75 million due in July next year and $200 million due in 2019 – are all trading at distressed levels.

Qatar announced a decree by Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani late on Thursday establishing two nominal lists of individuals and terrorist entities, and the requirements for being included in them.

It also defined terrorists, terrorist crimes, terrorist entities as well as the financing of terrorism.

The decree follows the signing on July 11 of a US-Qatar agreement to combat terror funding during a visit to Doha by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to try to defuse the Gulf crisis.

However, the four Arab countries at odds with Doha dismissed that deal as “insufficent”.

On Friday, the UAE state minister for foreign affairs welcomed the latest Qatar move.

“It is a positive step to deal seriously with the list of 59 terrorists,” Anwar Gargash said in a tweet. “The pressure linked to the crisis has begun to bear fruit.”

But Gargash, repeated his demands for Qatar to reorient its policies in order to ease the crisis with its Arab neighbours.

“It would be wiser (for Qatar) to totally change its (political) orientation,” he said.

The dispute erupted when regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt broke ties with Qatar on June 5, accusing it of backing extremism. Doha denies the claim.

They have imposed sanctions on Doha, including closing its only land border, refusing Qatar access to their airspace and ordering their citizens back from Qatar.

On June 9, Saudi Arabia and its allies published a list of 59 people and 12 organisations they accuse of involvement in “terrorism” with support from Qatar. Doha rejected the claim as unfounded.

And on June 22, they went on to present the emirate with a list of 13 demands with which to comply to end the worst political crisis in the region for years.

The changes Qatar announced to its anti-terror legislation amend an earlier law published in 2004 but Thursday’s decree did not provide details of the exact nature of the revisions.

The demonstrators had gathered in the town of Beerwah after senior separatist leaders called for a strike against Indian rule.

Soldiers opened fire after mistaking a firecracker for a grenade explosion, police said.

“Someone among these miscreants (protesters) … hurled a firecracker towards the army men. Because of the bang the army men thought a grenade was hurled and they retaliated,” the statement said.

Authorities have imposed a curfew in parts of the main city of Srinagar where separatists had called for a march to the office of a UN military observer group to protest against recent civilian killings and arrest of dozens of political activists.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947, but both claim the Himalayan territory in full.

For decades rebel groups have fought roughly 500,000 Indian soldiers deployed in the territory, demanding independence or a merger with Pakistan.

Tens of thousands, mostly civilians, have died in the fighting which had subsided in recent years but armed encounters between rebels and government forces have become more frequent since security forces killed a popular rebel commander in July.

The country’s sports officials formally abandoned their plans to host the games after a series of meetings with President Rodrigo Duterte, Philippine Sports Commission chairman William Ramirez said.

“Resources shall be focused on rehabilitation and rebuilding of Marawi instead of funding the 2019 hosting of the Southeast Asian Games,” Ramirez said in a statement on the commission’s Facebook page.

Muslim militants flying the black flag of the Islamic State group occupied parts of the southern city of Marawi two months ago, triggering prolonged fighting with military forces.

More than 550 people have been killed and air strikes and artillery have left much of the city of 200,000 in ruins.

Duterte has imposed martial law over the southern third of the Philippines to stamp out the militant threat.

The Philippines agreed in 2015 to host the 2019 SEA Games after two other countries, Brunei and Vietnam, declined.

A July 7 press release that followed Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar’s meeting with Facebook’s Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan had attempted to paint a rosy picture for Pakistan’s digital future.

Facebook, according to the release (authored by the interior ministry), had agreed to greater cooperation on the interior minister’s initiatives against online blasphemy.

For the interior ministry, the meeting with Kaplan was important because it gave the interior minister a chance to negotiate greater control over what gets shared online.

However, with the meeting touted as a successful milestone in the interior ministry’s clampdown on blasphemous content on social media, what got glossed over was what Facebook seemed to be asking for in return.

Facebook’s Free Basics project

The social media giant may have conceded some ground to Nisar on blocking problematic content, but what it stands to gain from a deal with Pakistani policymakers is something that it values much more.

Facebook’s activities in Pakistan, which Nisar was briefed about in the meeting, are going to be linked with Facebook’s Free Basics project, which involves targeting 600,000 school-going children to ‘increase internet literacy among youth’.

Free Basics, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal project, is a revolutionary idea – at least on paper. It allows those without conventional access to the internet to explore basic versions of multiple websites and platforms. Weather reports, news, Facebook and games are just some of the things people will have ‘free’ access to under Free Basics.

The expansion of this project, as it turns out, was a key agenda item for the Nisar-Kaplan meeting.

Free Basics and net neutrality

Facebook’s Free Basics project has been shot down in India and elsewhere because of concerns over what is known as the principle of ‘net neutrality’.

Net neutrality is simply the idea that the internet should remain an open platform where information can be exchanged freely between providers and consumers.

In practice, this requires that internet service providers (ISPs), when processing requests from customers, do not favour a particular platform or website over another and ensure that all websites and applications are equally accessible.

Net neutrality ensures that your ISP does not charge you more if you want to stream content from YouTube or Netflix rather than from a local video-sharing site (or even vice versa). It also ensures that your ISP does not restrict your streaming speed while you browse foreign websites, but boosts your bandwidth when browsing a local website (which might be paying it to do so). Each provider thus gets a level playing field to reach consumers of its content.

It is this idea that has allowed small, home-based startups — like Facebook itself — to become giants online. It has also ensured that news from both small and large organisations is equally accessible to readers.

How exactly does Free Basics harm the industry? 

For starters, by allowing access to only a small number of websites and platforms, Free Basics provides a clear edge to them over others. New entrants and small developers, even with brilliant interfaces and content, will find it difficult to break in and will have to first get on board with Facebook if they want to reach wider markets.

Facebook could (theoretically) use this power to monopolise the internet and control, to a great degree, what kind of information is available to its users.

Although Zuckerberg has dismissed claims that net neutrality will be affected by the project, he has yet to answer some critical questions: Why is it that only certain websites would be available on the portal rather than basic versions of all websites? And why is it that this particular model, which threatens net neutrality, was chosen when others could have worked much better?

‘Problematic collaborations’  

Facebook already has ongoing collaborations in Pakistan with two major telecom operators, Telenor and Zong, in connection with the Free Basics project, meaning that it already has control over millions of users that other platforms do not.

“We raised concerns regarding net neutrality when Facebook first began its collaboration with Telenor a year ago,” Nighat Dad of the Digital Rights Foundation told Dawn.com.

To her dismay, however, “there is no conversation or debate [at the policy level] in Pakistan about issues like net neutrality. Even the IT sector in Pakistan does not realise the true impact of this project.”

When contacted, Telenor Pakistan said that it saw Facebook Free Basics as a part of its “ambition to bring ‘Internet for All’ and affordable access to basic online services”.

Regarding the impact of the project on its paid internet services, Telenor spokesperson Areej Aurangzeb Khan said that the company feels the project is “great” for internet uptake in developing economies and its benefit to the company is “essentially long-term”.

It also did not see the project as raising concern with regards to net neutrality as it falls under Telenor’s idea of an “Open Internet”. The company said it believes “everyone should be able to enjoy the full benefits of the Internet” and in providing customers the ability to choose products that serve their needs, which could be “full-fledged high speed services” or “more limited and cheaper access”.

In conversation with Dawn.com, Shahzad Ahmad, country director of Bytes for All, asked the all-important question: whose responsibility is it to ensure affordable internet is available to everyone?

“The government created the Universal Service Fund (USF) to ensure connectivity for people from mountainous regions and disconnected areas; budget adjustments and corruption have led to its practical demise,” Ahmad recalled. The aims of USF were similar to Free Basics — provide people cut off from communication networks a chance to maintain contact.

“It is the responsibility of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and the Ministry of Information and Technology [not private companies] to ensure that internet users are protected,” he said.

“Governments in Pakistan are not fully aware of what the internet entails,” Dad added, citing the oft-criticised national IT policy as an example. “The Punjab Information Technology Board is doing some work but governments in other provinces have no idea of issues like net neutrality.”

With Pakistanis increasingly using internet, especially social media platforms, for their daily dose of information, a Facebook-monopolised internet would mean they would only know what Facebook wants them to know.

So while Nisar may be under the impression that he has been able to increase his control over social media after his meeting with Kaplan, in the long run, he could lose it all if Facebook successfully monopolises the internet.

The ‘success’ of the July 7 meeting therefore presents a potential danger for Pakistan’s internet users — not only could Pakistanis be censored from saying what the interior minister does not want them to say, but also from knowing what Facebook does not want them to know.

Audi, Volkswagen and Porsche vehicles with affected engines in Europe and other markets outside North America will receive a free software upgrade “that improves emissions behaviour in real driving conditions further beyond existing legal requirements,” the company said in a statement.