A special prosecutor's team looking into a political scandal involving President Park Geun-hye requested the arrest warrant on Monday for Samsung Electronics' vice chairman Lee Jae-yong. It is accusing Lee of bribery, embezzlement, and other charges.

The Seoul Central District Court summoned Lee for questioning on Wednesday, which lasted 4 hours.

South Korean media report that the court denied the request early Thursday.

The court reportedly judged there was not enough reason to issue the arrest warrant for Lee at this point.

Lee returned home from a detention house where he was awaiting the court decision.

The prosecutors say Lee paid about 36 million dollars to 2 foundations closely linked to the president's confidante Choi Soon-sil, in return for favors from the presidential office involving the merger of 2 Samsung affiliates.

The merger is believed to have been necessary for Lee to become head of the group's management.

Local media report that denial of the arrest warrant could deal a heavy blow to the prosecutors, who had planned to arrest Lee, while overriding concern about the negative impact on the country's economy.

Cho is alleged to have helped create a blacklist of over 9,400 cultural figures considered critical of the administration of the country's disgraced president. Park Geun-hye is embroiled in an influence-peddling scandal.

The special prosecutor's team suspects the figures on the list were denied government support.

They asked a court in Seoul on Wednesday to issue arrest warrants for Cho and a former presidential chief of staff.

The court is to consider whether to approve the warrants, which include the first request to arrest a current minister in connection with Park's scandal.

Cho's predecessor, former culture minister Kim Jong-deok, was arrested last week on suspicion of abuse of power as part of the creation of the list.

Observers say attention is increasingly shifting to whether Park herself was involved in making the list.

The company said it “apologized unreservedly for the conduct which has been uncovered.”

The three countries launched the investigation five years ago, as they suspected Rolls-Royce of hiring intermediaries to pay bribes to win better contracts internationally.

According to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), this is the “largest individual investigation conducted by the SFO to date.”

The SFO concluded that in Indonesia, senior Rolls-Royce employees agreed to pay $2.25 million and give a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit car to an intermediary in exchange for a “favor to Rolls-Royce on a contract” for Trent aero engines. Separately, the British firm bribed a rival bidder to submit an uncompetitive bid to keep the contract.

In China, Rolls-Royce paid $5 million to CES, a state-owned Chinese airline, while negotiating the sale of T700 engines. The company agreed to provide the Chinese with a two-week MBA course at Columbia University, and "four-star accommodation and lavish extracurricular activities."

In Russia, Rolls-Royce won a contract to supply equipment to the state-owned gas company Gazprom by paying a senior Gazprom official, the SFO concluded.

Brian Leveson, the president of the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court, said if Rolls-Royce had not been prosecuted, it would be hard to pursue any other company in the future.

“My reaction when first considering these papers was that if Rolls-Royce were not to be prosecuted in the context of such egregious criminality over decades, involving countries around the world, making truly vast corrupt payments and, consequentially, even greater profits, then it was difficult to see when any company would be prosecuted,” he said in his judgment.

Wang's investments in the U.S. have attracted the attention of some U.S. lawmakers, who have called for tougher government scrutiny of such deals.
Wang brushed aside those concerns, saying the U.S. had nothing to fear.
"So far, the U.S. government has not launched any censorship or control of entertainment," he said. "That would be a step back."
But Wang also made clear that there would be consequences if the U.S. chose to interfere.
"If China were to retaliate, it would be bad for both parties," he said, adding that he had asked the head of the Motion Picture Association of America to tell President-elect Donald Trump: "No war, please."
But it's far from a level playing field. China already enforces strict controls on American entertainment companies, limiting the number of Western movies that can be shown in cinemas, and censoring their content.

Buying a major Hollywood studio would make Wang a top player in the industry. He already owns the AMC Theaters chain, and is active in film distribution. A major studio would give him control of film production, too.
If a deal were to materialize, he pledged to take a hands-off approach with the studio.
"It's still a company run by Americans," he said. "We won't interfere with content. We just want the profit."

Representatives from state-owned Sberbank and the Alibaba Group have already met this month to discuss the potential project, the newspaper reported, citing an unnamed source.

Any joint venture would see Sberbank control at least a 50 percent stake and provide much of the financial investment, the source said. In return, the Alibaba group would use its existing cross-border infrastructure and delivery systems across Russia neighboring countries.

The venture, which may become one of the largest players in Russian e-commerce, could be worth several billion dollars, Kommersant reported.

The Alibaba Group registered a Russian subsidiary in June 2015, opening its flagship e-commerce site AliExpress to Russian retailers five months later.

The online retail market continues to grow in Russia, with 43 percent of Russians buying from foreign online retailers in the past 12 months, according to research from the Data Insight company in March 2016.

Russian retailers exporting online have also seen their sales almost double over the past year, outstripping domestic e-commerce with sales worth approximately $2 billion.

According to the CEO of Saudi Arabia’s giant state-held oil company, global demand for oil and gas will still grow in the coming decades, so if capital investment drops, it could create “spikes” in prices and hurt the global economy, CNBC reports. Demand is still healthy and oil “will be with us for decades”, CNBC quoted Nasser as telling a Wall Street Journal panel at the Davos forum.

The global oil and gas industry needs to expand and requires more investment, Nasser said.

After two years of significantly lowered capital investment by the industry, a recent report by Wood Mackenzie suggests that “the global investment cycle will show the first signs of growth in 2017, bringing the crushing two-year investment slump to a close”.

WoodMac sees E&P global spend rise with about 3 percent in 2017 to around $450 billion. According to WoodMac’s Malcolm Dickson, ‘’companies will get more bang for their buck,” as internal rates of return jump from 9 to 16 percent, comparing 2014 to 2017.

The chart below from WoodMac shows that the amount of final investment decisions (FID’s) are expected to double in 2017, compared to 2016.

At the WEF, Saudi Aramco’s chief executive noted that renewables would gain some market share in the long run, but renewable energy would not dominate.

“It will take decades for them [renewables] to replace petroleum resources. So what we are doing in Saudi Aramco we are building our capacity in the oil,” according to the manager.

Saudi Arabia currently has oil capacity of 12.5 million bpd, which it continues to build upon, Nasser said.

The Kingdom also plans to double its gas capacity over the next decade, which would enable it to ship more crude oil onto the market, Saudi Aramco’s manager added.

Just yesterday, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih said that his country would begin soliciting bids for a “massive” renewable energy push, with spending reaching as high as $50 billion. The move is intended to source at least 10 GW of electricity from solar and wind by 2023, a rapid escalation of renewable energy installations for the Kingdom in order to conserve oil for exports.

Tibet consumed 4.18 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2016, up 21.4 percent, according to an industry report.

The region achieved a gross domestic product of 115 billion yuan ($17 billion) in 2016, 11.5 percent up on 2015, according to the local annual legislative meeting held last week. The rate is nearly 5 percentage points higher than the national average.

Two electricity transmission lines, one from Qinghai and the other from Sichuan, were put into operation in 2012 and 2014.

With the power grid now covering nearly 80 percent of counties in Tibet, electricity consumption in rural areas has grown.

The region is also replacing coal burning with electricity.

"A total of 142 million kilowatt hours of electricity replaced coal in 2016," said Liu Xiaoming with the State Grid's Tibet Electric Power Co. "The region is expected to replace 177,100 tons of coal with one billion kilowatt hours of electricity."