Current Affairs For Bank, IBPS Exams - 21 December, 2013

Current Affairs For Bank, IBPS Exams

Infosys, on Friday, announced the exit its long-serving director V. Balakrishnan from the company.
The resignation of Mr. Balakrishnan, who was associated with the company for over two decades, is effective from December 31, the company said in a statement.
Describing Mr. Balakrishnan as “an early adopter and a keen anchor builder,” N. R. Narayana Murthy, Executive Chairman, Infosys, said, “It is difficult to imagine Infosys without Bala’s passion, commitment, and intellect.”
S. D. Shibulal, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director said, Mr. Balakrishnan, who had earlier functioned as the company’s Chief Financial Officer, played a “pivotal role in building the finance function, and has been a key driver behind all of our achievements in areas of investor relations and corporate governance.”

Tightening the norms for credit card issuers, the Reserve Bank of India, on Friday, asked banks to treat outstandings as bad loans in case customers fail to pay the minimum due amount within a stipulated period.
With a view to bringing consistency and inducing transparency, the RBI said, “it is advised that a credit card account will be treated as non-performing asset if the minimum amount due, as mentioned in the statement, is not paid fully within 90 days from the next statement date.’’

India and China have taken the first step towards pushing forward an ambitious corridor linking the two countries with Bangladesh and Myanmar, as representatives from the four nations held the first ever official-level discussions about the project this week.
The four nations have for the first time drawn up a specific timetable on taking forward the long discussed plan, emphasising the need to quickly improve physical connectivity in the region, over two days of talks in the south-western Chinese city of Kunming – the provincial capital of Yunnan, which borders Myanmar – on Wednesday and Thursday.
The BCIM project, which has been the subject of discussions and debates for more than a decade among scholars from the four countries, finally received official support earlier this year, highlighted as a key initiative during two meetings between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang, in New Delhi in May and in Beijing in October.

The death of three Indian UN peacekeepers on Thursday has brought into sharp focus a power struggle, whose roots may lie not so much in an inter-ethnic contest for political ascendancy, but a larger tussle for the control and diversion of South Sudan’s rich energy and mineral resources.
The three soldiers were killed when fighting between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar spiralled on Thursday, resulting in an attack on a UN peacekeeping base.
The targeted UN stronghold in the town of Akobo is in Jonglei State whose capital Bor is already under the control of Mr. Machar’s forces, making it an ideal base for a further advance.
UN forces are protecting 14,000 civilians who have fled the fighting in Bor.
More than 500 people have so far been killed amid fears that a civil war may be on the cards, riding on the growing animosities between the country’s Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon and political opponent of Vladimir Putin, has been released from prison after being pardoned by the Russian President.
Mr. Khodorkovsky, who has spent the last 10 years in prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion, left a prison colony in Russia’s northwest near the Arctic Circle, on Friday morning, within an hour after the Kremlin published Mr. Putin’s decree pardoning the 50-year-old businessman on “humanitarian” grounds.
Mr. Putin said Mr. Khodorkovsky had cited his mother’s worsening illness when asking for clemency.
Russia’s richest man and owner of the country’s largest oil company was arrested in October 2003 and sentenced to eight years in prison. His company, Yukos, was dismantled and taken over by the state. In 2010 Mr. Khodorkovsky was tried again on charges of embezzlement and slapped with another prison term that would have kept him behind bars till August 2014.