Economy
UniCredit gets ECB green light for Commerzbank takeover
The European Central Bank (ECB) has authorized the takeover of Germany’s Commerzbank AG by UniCredit, the Italian lender said Thursday, calling it an “important milestone” that underscored confidence in its bid.
By acquiring Commerzbank, valued at 35 billion euros ($39 billion), UniCredit plans to cement its status as a European heavyweight.
The deal – long contested by Commerzbank – should enable UniCredit to merge Commerzbank with its German subsidiary HypoVereinsbank, acquired in 2005.
UniCredit said it had received the authorization from the ECB to “cross the 30% equity participation threshold in Commerzbank AG… and to increase its stake further without upper limits.”
“The decision represents an important milestone in UniCredit’s acquisition of Commerzbank, underscoring the ECB’s positive assessment of the transaction and the confidence in UniCredit’s solid fundamentals and strong standing within the European banking sector,” it said.
The final regulatory steps are expected around year-end, by when “UniCredit will have approximately 50% of Commerzbank’s voting rights and be able to take control of the bank,” it said.
UniCredit is notably proposing to make cuts in Commerzbank’s international network, deemed too complex and inefficient, and to refocus the bank on its activities in Germany.
European officials have been multiplying calls for greater integration in the banking sector, arguing that the persistent fragmentation of the European Union is hampering the continent’s competitiveness.
Vital role
In a surprise move in September 2024, UniCredit took a stake in Commerzbank and thereafter built up a stake of nearly 50%, despite fierce resistance from the German lender and Berlin, with the German state still owning 12% of the capital.
Commerzbank slashed thousands of jobs and hiked its financial targets in an effort to convince shareholders to back its campaign to remain independent.
But these efforts failed and, with UniCredit closing in on a controlling stake, Commerzbank’s CEO Bettina Orlopp called in late July for “constructive” talks with the Italian lender.
Berlin has, for its part, asked the head of the Italian bank, Andrea Orcel, to preserve the role of Germany’s second-largest private bank in the country’s economy.
Last month, German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil met with Orcel seeking guarantees over the bank’s future. He said it was of “paramount importance” that Commerzbank “continue to fulfill its vital role in financing the German economy.”
UniCredit wants to create a European banking behemoth better able to take on bigger U.S. rivals, arguing that a merger would strengthen the region’s fragmented banking sector.
That is why, despite resistance in Germany, some policymakers in Brussels and at the European Central Bank have been more supportive of the possible takeover.
A gas pipeline in Syria’s northeast was damaged in a “sabotage attack, ” the state-owned petroleum company said Thursday, the latest such incident against an energy conduit in recent weeks.
The explosion followed a separate incident on Thursday morning in which a pipeline transporting oil products from the coastal city of Baniyas to the central province of Homs was damaged in what the Syrian Petroleum Company described as sabotage aimed at stealing fuel.
Years of civil war before the fall of longtime dictator Bashar Assad in late 2024 devastated Syria’s oil, gas and electricity sectors, with the country becoming heavily reliant on imports to meet its needs.
“The Al-Jabsa production gas pipeline was targeted” in Hasakah province, causing a fire, the Syrian Petroleum Company said, according to official news agency SANA.
The company said that the 16-inch pipeline exploded at 5:15 p.m. in an area about 60 km from the city of Al-Shaddadi.
Technical teams isolated the damaged section by closing valves at the plant and the Deir ez-Zor gas station in the al-Bughailiya area, while firefighting and safety crews headed to the site to secure the area, the statement said.
“Relevant authorities are monitoring the situation. The area has been cordoned off, the isolation valves on either side of the targeted section have been closed, and the surrounding area has been secured,” the company said.
That incident at the Baniyas-Homs oil products pipeline caused a gasoline leak, the company said, adding that work was continuing to repair the damage and restore the line to service.
The state petroleum company said last week that an oil pipeline in the country’s northeast was also damaged in a sabotage attack.
On Sept. 29, sabotage targeting a gas pipeline in eastern Syria caused an explosion, according to SANA.
And in early October, an explosion at a gas pipeline near the capital Damascus took three power stations offline.
The incidents come after demonstrations last month over rising fuel prices, which authorities linked to price hikes caused by the Middle East war.
Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million for U.S. President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom, according to a report on Thursday that showed $333 million in private donations for the project.
The Adelson family, longtime financial supporters of Trump and his Republican Party, committed $25 million as well, as did billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chair of telecommunications company Dish Network, the Washington Post reported.
The president himself is not on the list, according to the Post.
The White House said it would not release information about the donors, which spokesperson Davis Ingle said “represent a wide array of great American companies.”
“The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests, would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” Ingle told Reuters.
Nvidia said it was proud to make a donation to a nonpartisan trust that serves Americans. “As an American company, our support for the United States is paramount, and independent of any business interests,” a spokesperson said.
Apple declined to comment.
The scale of the ballroom project and the administration’s handling of fundraising and disclosures have drawn criticism from watchdog groups and legal experts, who say it raises questions about transparency, donor influence and adherence to longstanding ethics and oversight norms.
Trump initially said he and wealthy donors would pay for the estimated $400 million project, but he later unsuccessfully sought $1 billion from Congress for an underground bunker and security features to harden the facility.
The Post reported that the “vast majority of the funds raised came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government” and that half the total came from companies or executives of firms that have had federal government contracts in Trump’s second White House term.
The planned ballroom is among several projects Trump is pursuing in his efforts to remake Washington with sweeping, unilateral changes that his opponents have challenged in court and called a power grab.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling in August, allowed Trump to continue construction of the ballroom while he challenges a judicial order that would halt much of the development. In a dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts said the project was “likely unlawful.”
The ballroom, which Trump has said will seat 1,000 guests, has faced public backlash. Preservationists and opponents say Trump exceeded his authority by demolishing the historic East Wing, which housed the first lady’s offices and the White House movie theater, to make room for the structure.
Trump says a planned 8,360-square-meter (90,000-square-foot) ballroom will include bomb shelters, medical facilities, defenses against drones and missiles and other security features. Confronted with criticism of the project, his administration now says the facility is needed for national security, an argument the president has also made about a proposed triumphal arch.
Israeli digital advertising agency Discover-Tech spied on internet users through a sprawling network of online ads that it used to track targets and help hack their devices, two research groups said Thursday.
Its services gave Israel’s Candiru – a spyware company blacklisted by the U.S. government – as well as other Israeli surveillance firms access to advertising platforms run by Google, Comcast, Russia’s Yandex and others, according to separate reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant.
The reports show how the online advertising business, long a subject of privacy concerns, can also serve as a channel for sweeping espionage campaigns.
“The way online advertising works today is a systemic security threat,” Wolfie Christl, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, told Reuters. “For states, the private sector, civil society and everyone else alike.”
Discover-Tech’s online ads – often for ordinary products such as phones or earbuds – reached more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps through its various partnerships, Citizen Lab said.
Users who visited sites or used apps with the malicious ads could be identified and tracked by Discover-Tech, which would sometimes also try to extract phone numbers from some smartphone users, the researchers said. Ads only needed to load on a website for the spying to occur.
Some ads would be used to help plant spyware from Candiru on users’ devices, both research groups said, though Confiant said that ads it tied to Candiru were a tiny fraction of Discover-Tech’s overall volume.
Malicious ads shown in hundreds of sensitive networks
Confiant co-founder Jerome Dangu said Discover-Tech was pumping out at least 10 million ads per day all around the world and that data-sharing arrangements – called cookie matching – allowed it to track people even beyond the reach of its advertisements.
“Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Dangu said.
Discover-Tech, which was founded in 2020, did not return messages left via its contact form. A LinkedIn message and emails sent to its chief executive, Dekel Boni, were not returned.
Attempts to reach Candiru’s owners were similarly unsuccessful. The U.S. Commerce Department blacklisted Candiru in 2021 for allegedly supplying spyware that was used to maliciously target government officials, journalists, activists and academics.
Citizen Lab said a powerful form of Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads had been used to compromise 45 Windows devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera between 2024 and 2025, something it said it was able to confirm because the media group had shared its network logs with the group.
In a statement, Al Jazeera said it “condemns the spyware attacks targeting a number of its staff” and that it was taking steps to protect its employees and its systems. “Those responsible must be held accountable,” it said.
Dangu of Confiant said that the malicious ads had been shown to users in “hundreds of networks in sensitive categories,” including the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). He also said that some regions, like the Palestinian territories, were particularly saturated by the Israeli firm’s ads.
“You go to almost any site in Palestine – any site – you find a Discover-Tech ad. It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country,” he said.
Citizen Lab also said it had similar evidence showing the malicious ads were shown to people in the United Nations, NATO, the European Commission, and more than a dozen national governments. Other networks the ads appeared in included chip-related firms such as Nvidia, Sandisk, Broadcom and Micron, as well as several media organizations in Mexico, Israel and Europe that were not identified.
In addition to identifying Candiru and a couple of other surveillance vendors, Citizen Lab said it was able to glean some details about where Discover-Tech’s users might be based because the firm inadvertently exposed its authentication logs to the internet, showing people logging in from internet protocol addresses in Israel, Europe and the Gulf.
Measures against Discover-Tech taken
Discover-Tech is now being frozen out of parts of the online ad market.
Google said in a statement that it had collaborated with Citizen Lab and Confiant’s investigation and kicked Discover-Tech off its ad platforms “for systematically violating our policies.”
IAB Europe, the European-level association for the digital marketing and advertising ecosystem, said in an email that Discover-Tech had been suspended from its list of globally approved vendors last week after an audit identified policy violations.
Comcast ad tech subsidiary Beeswax removed Discover-Tech from its platform “following recent activity,” Comcast said in a statement. Yandex did not return messages seeking comment.
Advertising-driven surveillance is increasingly being seen as a national security threat. Earlier this year, the Pentagon said it had received reports that U.S. forces deployed to war zones had been targeted using location data harvested by ad tech firms and data brokers. Branches of the military have since disabled ad tracking on some devices.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) could appoint Christine Lagarde as its next chair as soon as next month, a report said Thursday, meaning she would step down early as European Central Bank (ECB) chief and trigger a wider reshuffle at the top of the monetary authority.
Lagarde’s ECB term is scheduled to end in October 2027. Leaving early would give European Union leaders a chance to pick a new ECB president before France’s spring presidential election, which opinion polls suggest the far-right could win, and could pave the way for a deal involving two other senior ECB roles.
The WEF’s Board of Trustees, which includes Lagarde herself, was due to meet on Nov. 2 and could elect her as its next chair, Reuters reported, citing four people close to the organization, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
No final decision has been taken yet, they said.
A spokesperson for the WEF said the forum could not confirm when the next full Board of Trustees meeting would take place, but that the aim was to hold one before the end of the year.
Two of the people said the board could also set a date for a vote that would enable Lagarde to appear as the designated chair when the WEF’s annual meeting takes place in January in Davos, where political and business leaders gather to discuss global economic and financial issues.
They cautioned that Lagarde’s election was not certain but said the 70-year-old former French finance minister had broad support from the board, which lists 27 members on its website.
The ECB declined to comment.
Finding successor before French elections
Either timetable would leave enough time for a new ECB president to clear all the formal hurdles that come with EU appointments well before the end of French President Emmanuel Macron’s term in May.
Lagarde’s desire to give Macron a say on her successor was one factor in the timing, a fifth person said. There is concern in European political circles that negotiations over who takes over from her could become more difficult if far-right leader Marine Le Pen were to win the French presidency.
Based in Geneva, the WEF board is currently co-chaired by BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink and Roche Vice Chair Andre Hoffmann, who assumed the role after founder Klaus Schwab stepped down last year.
The board also includes public-sector figures such as International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and Jordan’s Queen Rania and leading business chiefs like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Siemens’ Jim Hagemann Snabe.
Lagarde, who is attending the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok this week, has said she will remain at the ECB until next year but has stopped short of committing to remain until her term formally ends in October.
Her exit would open a second vacancy on the ECB’s six-member Executive Board after Isabel Schnabel’s resignation last month. Chief Economist Philip Lane is meanwhile due to step down in May.
EU officials say the three appointments could be agreed as part of a package deal among member states.
The former central bank governors of the Netherlands and Spain, Klaas Knot and Pablo Hernandez de Cos, are seen as front-runners for the presidency, while France is understood to be targeting the chief economist’s post.
Germany plans to put forward a candidate to replace Schnabel, who heads the ECB’s market operations, the people said.
Prolonged conflict in the Middle East and ongoing disruptions to energy output, shipping routes, or critical infrastructure present the biggest risk to economies in the region and Central Asia, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Thursday.
Jihad Azour, the IMF’s director for the Middle East and Central Asia, told reporters the war was imposing a highly uneven economic shock to the broader region, with directly affected states under severe pressure.
“The outlook depends critically on how quickly energy production and trade normalize, and on countries’ ability to preserve macroeconomic stability,” Azour said at a news conference during the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Bangkok.
The IMF will release a fuller outlook for the region on Oct. 22.
Pre-war surpluses, alternative routes, demand adjustments and substantial inventory drawdowns had helped contain the impact of the energy shock caused by the U.S.-Israeli-led attacks on Iran and Tehran’s subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
“These buffers bought time, but they are finite. Inventories are lower, spare capacity is tighter, and renewed disruption could generate much larger price adjustments,” he said.
The global lender is forecasting a deep contraction of 1.3% in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan region after growth of 3.3% in 2025, followed by a strong but uneven rebound in 2027, when growth is expected to hit 6.6%, Azour said, noting substantial differences across the region.
The forecast assumes a resumption of normal trade and shipping in the first quarter of 2027, with exports gradually normalizing by mid-year and oil prices staying higher.
Azour said the forecast was predicated on a quick resumption of production, noting that Qatar, for instance, had been able to accelerate its recovery despite suffering massive destruction of its natural gas capacity.
But he said the shock would have a scarring impact on various sectors, with damage to infrastructure requiring additional spending, and the risks were tilted to the downside.
Oil-exporting countries directly affected by the war would see a significant contraction in 2026 and a sharp rebound in growth in 2027 as energy production normalizes, but output was expected to remain below pre-war medium-term projections.
The economies of oil-importing countries in the region had been resilient and were expected to remain so, he said.
The Caucasus and Central Asia region had weathered the shock relatively well and inflation was expected to continue declining from elevated levels. The IMF is projecting growth to slow to 5.2% in 2026 and then 5% in 2027, from growth of 6.2% in 2025.
Azour said policymakers should prioritize price stability, focus on rebuilding fiscal buffers and expand their capacity to withstand future shocks.
Ukrainian drones hit Russia’s biggest data center on Wednesday, part of a series of attacks appearing to target Moscow’s ambitions to develop Russian artificial intelligence capabilities on a par with those from the U.S. and China.
The strike on the Balakovo data center, owned by Sberbank, the country’s largest bank and technology company, followed three attacks in the past week on data centers owned by Russian technology group Yandex.
“We confirm that the data processing center was attacked. At the same time, all of Sberbank’s systems and services are operating normally and without disruption,” Sberbank First Deputy CEO Alexander Vedyakhin told reporters.
Russia’s state RIA Novosti news agency reported in 2024 that the Sberbank center hit on Wednesday would host Russia’s biggest supercomputer, which is scheduled to go into operation in 2027.
The Yandex data centers, hit earlier, hosted all three of that company’s operating supercomputers. Neither Yandex nor Sberbank has said whether supercomputers, used to train the AI models, were damaged in the Ukrainian attacks.
Along with Yandex, its main domestic rival, Sberbank is Russia’s leading developer of artificial intelligence. The domestic market is shared between Sberbank’s GigaChat model and YandexGPT.
Difficulties purchasing chips
Both companies have invested heavily in the development of their models but lag global leaders in the United States and China by up to nine months, according to Sberbank’s own estimates, partly due to Western sanctions which hinder Russia’s access to the most advanced hardware.
“It’s clear what difficulties we face when purchasing modern graphics processing units. Both we and Yandex suffer from this,” Sberbank’s CEO, German Gref, said on Sept. 29, calling it the biggest reason why Russia lags behind the US and China in AI.
Sberbank is in talks to buy chips from Chinese makers, but in an interview with Reuters on June 3, Vedyakhin said that U.S. chipmaker Nvidia’s monopoly on its CUDA software platform, which has become an AI industry standard, is an even greater problem.
Yandex said previously that its supercomputers operated on Nvidia A100 chips, a model launched in 2020 and since then succeeded by more advanced H100 chips.
Sberbank has two functioning supercomputers. The most advanced one, called Christofari Neo, ranked 167th in the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, is located in Moscow and is based on Nvidia A100 chips.
Yandex’s most advanced Chervonenkis supercomputer is ranked 101st in the same list.
IT expert Mikhail Klimarev told Reuters it could take a long time to replace the chips due to Western sanctions, while damage to the supercomputers could set back the Russian AI industry, which already suffered from sanctions.
“The equipment is being imported, but it’s done at a high cost, through indirect routes. First, you need to negotiate so that someone is willing to sell it to you and is not afraid of sanctions,” he said.
Protect assets
Some commentators compared the lack of reported disruption at state-controlled Sberbank with Yandex – whose taxi and food delivery units had reported disruptions – saying it showed that Sberbank’s centers are better protected.
“This is a great example of what a business owner can do to protect their assets,” wrote military blogger Alexander Kots. Under an August decree by President Vladimir Putin, the state can take over administration of poorly protected facilities.
The Sberbank site is located close to the Balakovo nuclear power plant, which the data center uses as an energy source, and the Saratov hydroelectric power plant. No damage was reported to either plant from the attack.
Ukraine says it is responding to Russian attacks on its own data sites. Both countries have attacked each other’s refineries, power stations, ports and e-commerce companies.
Russia’s digital development ministry said this week it was in talks with the military on protecting the data centers, while some lawmakers called for them to be moved underground, where the hardware will be out of reach for drones.
-
Sports2 days agoFenerbahçe hope to turn Champions League tables against Aston Villa
-
Economy2 days agoBusiness world wants fresh momentum in Türkiye-EU engagement
-
Economy2 days agoIMF cuts Türkiye’s growth forecast to 2.7% in 2026, sees rebound
-
Politics2 days ago18 held in Türkiye over DHKP-C terror firebombings, shootings
-
Politics3 days agoUkraine looks to President Erdoğan for Putin talks
-
Economy2 days agoTürkiye aims to finish liquidating half of troubled funds this week
-
Economy3 days agoTürkiye logs $4B current account surplus in August
-
Sports2 days agoGalatasaray’s Champions League woes deepen after 4-1 loss to Barca