VENTURE CAPITAL POST

State oil giant Saudi Aramco [SDABO.UL] has put on hold its deepwater oil and gas exploration and drilling activities in the Red Sea because of high costs as it economizes in an environment of low crude prices, industry sources said on Sunday.

A lavish payout to public employees ordered by Saudi Arabia's new King Salman will help to sustain the kingdom's consumer boom and reassure financial markets that the government is not slashing expenditure in the face of low oil prices.

Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) has signed a deal with Iraq worth $11 billion (7 billion pounds) to build a petrochemicals plant in the southern oil hub of Basra, Industry Minister Nasser al-Esawi said on Wednesday.

Russian shoppers caught in a currency crunch are staying away from the Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) this year, but visitors from elsewhere look set to make up the numbers at the annual retail bonanza.

A subsidiary of Dubai’s Drake & Scull International DSI.DU (DSI) has won a 180 million dirham ($49 million) engineering contract in the emirate, the parent firm said on Sunday.

Commercial flights from Libya to mainland Europe resumed after more than six months on Saturday with a Libyan carrier taking off to Germany, the airline said.

U.S. tech giant Amazon is in talks to buy Israeli chipmaker Annapurna Labs for up to $370 million, financial newspaper Calcalist reported on Thursday.

Online document-sharing company Dropbox has acquired U.S.-Israeli CloudOn, a developer of tools to simplify creating and editing documents on mobile devices, the companies said on Wednesday.

Brent crude oil prices fell below $49 a barrel and U.S. crude also fell more than $1 on Monday after the global economic outlook darkened and Iraq announced record oil production.

Iran sees no sign of a shift within OPEC toward action to support oil prices, its oil minister said, adding its oil industry could ride out a further price slump to $25 a barrel.

A diplomatic push by Venezuela and Iran for an OPEC oil output cut has failed to soften the refusal of the group's Gulf members to do so for now, delegates said on Monday.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Venezuela's president on Saturday he backed coordinated action between Tehran and Caracas to reverse a rapid fall in global oil prices which he described as a "political ploy hatched by common enemies".

Complicated bureaucracy is delaying the launch of Qatar Airways' domestic operations in Saudi Arabia, and they are now expected to start in six to 18 months, the airline's chief executive was quoted as saying.

The central bank is burning through its foreign reserves and many government services are being cut as Libya reels under the effects of a collapse in oil revenues caused by factional fighting that threatens to tear the country apart.

Falling world oil prices will hurt countries across the Middle East unless Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest crude exporter, takes action to reverse the slump, Iran's deputy foreign minister told Reuters.