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Exclusive: Government officials around the globe targeted for hacking through WhatsApp – sources

Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation.

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Colombia's Grupo Aval to buy Multibank Financial Group

Grupo Aval, Colombia’s largest financial conglomerate, said on Thursday it had agreed to buy Panama’s Multibank Financial Group (MFG), giving it a higher profile in Central America. The transaction – which Aval will conduct through its subsidiary Banco de Bogota – will close in the second quarter of 2020, after completing a regulatory process, the company said in a statement to Colombia’s financial regulator. “This attractive transaction is complementary to the type of businesses that the company already participates in in Panama,” Grupo Aval president Luis Carlos Sarmiento said in the statement. …read more […]

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A Mega-Merger Can't Hide $12 Billion of Debt

(Bloomberg Opinion) — China has a standard road map for fixing state-owned giants that have gone off the rails: Create an even more inflated behemoth through a mega-merger, in the hope that the stronger business will be able to prop up the weaker one until the storm blows over.It’s a playbook that’s been followed in steel, shipping, energy and rolling stock — but in the chemicals industry, it’s not working. The country is planning to abandon the long-mooted merger of chemicals giants Sinochem Group Co. and China National Chemical Corp., or ChemChina, the Financial Times reported Thursday, citing people close …read more […]