Lila notes

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CORRECTED-UPDATE 2-IMF tells Belarus fresh credit depends on reform

* IMF wants wage restraint, higher interest rates* Ex-Soviet republic hit by high inflationBy Andrei MakhovskyMINSK, Oct 17 (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund on Monday stressed the need to restrain wage growth in Belarus and said the leadership of President Alexander Lukashenko would have to show clear commitment to reform if it hoped to secure new IMF credit.The ex-Soviet republic is in the grip of a severe financial crisis which has drained its foreign currency reserves, forced a 65 percent devaluation in the national currency and pushed inflation up to 75 percent in the year to date.Minsk has put out feelers for a possible new stand-by credit programme from the IMF of up to $7 billion, according to financial sources.Chris Jarvis, head of a visiting IMF mission, said that while the Fund applauded the partial floating of the Belarussian rouble as "an important step forward" there was a danger that gains could be wiped out by high inflation.Speaking to journalists, he said Belarus had to raise interest rates more sharply and the authorities should refrain from any further public wage increases.The IMF wants Belarus, which is run for the most part on old Soviet lines, to carry out structural and economic reforms to fully liberalise the economy."The authorities should also continue with and accelerate their work on structural reform, especially enterprise reform, privatization, price liberalization and banking sector reform," Jarvis said in a statement."Deep structural reform is needed for Belarus to achieve strong and lasting growth and to increase living standards in a durable way," he added.FOLLOW-UP ACTION NEEDEDIn a comment angled at Lukashenko, Belarus's authoritarian leader, Jarvis said the country's "highest" authorities had to show a clear commitment to reforms and follow through with action if a fresh programme was to be forthcoming from the Fund."Before programme negotiations could begin, as a first step, the authorities will need to demonstrate a clear commitment, including at the highest level, to stability and reforms and to reflect this commitment in their actions," he said.He implicitly criticised Lukashenko for raising public sector wages shortly before an election last December in which he won a fourth consecutive term in power, which is disputed by the political opposition and in the West."Wage restraint is ... crucial. The role of the November 2010 wage increase in contributing to the crisis ... is now widely recognised," he said.After a previous IMF programme had been completed in 2010 there had been a softening in economic policy especially in credit policy and in the pay sector, he said.Belarus has introduced special free-trade sessions for the rouble, while maintaining a separate official exchange rate tightly controlled by the central bank.While this official rate stood on Monday at 5,692 roubles per dollar, it was down at 8,990 per dollar in the free-float trading session, up slightly from its low point of 9,010 last Friday.The Fund wants the national currency to be able to trade freely across the board and authorities are indicating they may meet the IMF on this point.A senior government official said on Saturday that Belarus would lift administrative caps and reinstate free currency trading."The government along with the National bank made the decision to carry out all currency trading in one session starting Oct. 20 ... with a flexible exchange rate regime," Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Rumas told Belarusian STV channel."The government will not use administrative measures to influence the currency exchange regime," he said.The government curbed free currency trade in March in an effort to rescue the rouble, which nevertheless was subsequently devalued twice, losing 65 percent of its value in all against the dollar.

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Cuba's Ladies in White mourn leader, vow to go on

A blue vase holding the ashes of Pollan, who died on Friday after a brief illness, sat on a small table with several photos of her and flowers brought by friends who included diplomats.Some of Cuba's most prominent dissidents attended the wake, where they grieved for the former school teacher who became one of Cuba's top opposition voices as she led the Ladies in White with a fearless defiance of the Cuban government.In contrast to other turbulent moments when her group was harassed by pro-government mobs, the streets outside her home were quiet, with life going on as usual.Leaders of the communist island have said nothing about her death, but in Washington White House Press Secretary Jay Carney praised Pollan and her group for having "courageously voiced the core desire of the Cuban people and of people everywhere to live in liberty.""Since the beginning of the (Obama) administration we have worked to reach out to the Cuban people in support of their desire to freely determine their future and Cuba's future. We will continue that work in Pollan's memory," he said.Pollan led the founding of the Ladies in White after 75 dissidents, including her husband Hector Maseda, were imprisoned in a March 2003 government crackdown known as Havana's Black Spring.Dressed in white and each carrying a single white flower, the women defied government pressure by staging silent marches every Sunday on one of Havana's main avenues demanding the release of their loved ones. At the end of each march, they shouted in unison "libertad," or freedom.Public protests were unheard of at the time and remain a rarity today in tightly controlled Cuba, where the government views dissidents as mercenaries for the United States, its longtime enemy that works closely with dissidents to promote political change.MARCHES WILL CONTINUELast year, after international condemnation for the death of an imprisoned dissident who staged a long hunger strike, President Raul Castro relented and released 115 political prisoners, including those from the 2003 crackdown, in a deal brokered by the Catholic Church.The Ladies in White, saying Cuba still has political prisoners, have continued their marches and will do so again this Sunday and into the future, said Berta Soler, Pollan's longtime co-leader of the group."We're going to continue our peaceful fight for the liberation of all political prisoners. We'll also continue defending the human rights of the Cuban people," vowed Soler, speaking in the hushed, grief-stricken ambience of Pollan's wake."We plan to march tomorrow on Fifth Avenue like we do every Sunday. It will be a special march for Laura," she said.Pollan's husband, Hector Maseda, told the women they must not stop, despite the loss of his wife."You have to keep going as you have until now, with intelligence, not accepting provocations. You have become a dagger in the middle of the heart of the government," he said.Despite the vows to go on, Pollan will not be easy to replace.Under her leadership, the Ladies in White were awarded the 2005 Sakharov award for human rights from the European Parliament, named for late Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov, and have been considered candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize."She was a person who gave her life over to fighting for the fundamental cause of human rights. (Her death) has been an irreparable loss," said Elizardo Sanchez, head of the independent Cuban Commission of Human Rights.Pollan died of cardiac arrest in a Havana hospital where she had been treated since October 7 for a pulmonary illness.Some of her supporters had raised questions about whether she had received good medical care in Cuba's state-run medical system, but Maseda praised the medical team attending her and said "they tried to save my wife' life until the last minute."Maseda said some of her ashes would be placed in a crypt in her hometown of Manzanillo in the southeastern province of Granma and others scattered in a field of flowers, as she had once requested.

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New Issue-EIB adds 325 mln SEK to 2020 bond

Borrower European Investment Bank (EIB)Issue Amount 325 million Swedish crownMaturity Date December 01, 2020Coupon 5.0 pctIssue price 115.50Payment Date October 21, 2011Lead Manager(s) JP MorganRatings Aaa (Moody's), AAA (S&P),AAA (Fitch)Listing LuxFull fees UndisclosedDenoms (K) 5Governing Law EnglishNotes The issue size will total 4.525 billionSwedish crown when fungibleISIN XS0219399275Security details and RIC, when available, will beonCustomers can right-click on the code forperformance analysis of this new issueFor ratings information, double click onFor all bonds data, double click onFor Top international bonds newsFor news about this issuer, double click on the issuer RIC,where assigned, and hit the newskey (F9 on Reuters terminals)Data supplied by International Insider.

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RIM scrambles to end global BlackBerry outage

Research In Motion, in a hastily announced conference call on Wednesday, vowed to eventually deliver all delayed email and instant messages to customers in five continents affected by the outage.It later told some of its corporate clients that it may not clear the huge backlog of messages until Thursday morning on the U.S. East Coast.The outage - and RIM's sluggish communications with its customers - have fanned rising dissatisfaction with its co-chief executives, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.Critics have called for a shake-up, saying the top managers have let the company fall too far behind Apple and other rivals in a rapidly changing market."The board clearly needs to take decisive action now - they need to draw a line in the sand," said Richard Levick, who runs a consultancy that specializes in crisis management."RIM needs to change its DNA entirely - they need to start thinking like a startup again, instead of a former market leader," he said.Though RIM's stock dropped modestly on Wednesday, its shares have already tumbled more than 50 percent this year on a series of profit warnings and product missteps - a sharp reversal of fortune for a company that once dominated the smartphone market.This week's disruption - the worst since an outage swept North America two years ago - may have damaged RIM's once-sterling reputation for secure and reliable message delivery - perhaps its No. 1 selling feature.RIM is unique among handset makers, as it compresses and encrypts data before pushing it to BlackBerry devices via carrier networks. Apple and others rely on the carrier networks to handle all routing and delivery of content.Even before this week's disruptions, many companies had started to balk at paying a premium to be locked into RIM's service. Some are now allowing employees to use alternative smartphones, particularly Apple's iPhone, for corporate mail, and the outage could accelerate the trend."One possibility could be that it encourages client companies to look more at other options such as allowing users to connect their own devices to the corporate server and save themselves the cost of buying everyone a BlackBerry," said Richard Windsor, global technology specialist at Nomura.DLA Piper, a law firm with 4,200 attorneys worldwide, is a prime example. It is accelerating discussions about switching to iPhones and Android devices, Don Jaycox, its chief information officer, said on Wednesday."This has brought it to the front-burner," Jaycox said. "It will cause more people to opt for other choices."UNIQUE SYSTEMThe corporate defections are making a big software transition even more crucial to RIM. The company is getting ready to shift its line of BlackBerry smartphones to the new central operating system first used in the poorly received PlayBook tablet.Without a successful shift, RIM may never regain market share lost to the iPhone and devices powered by Google's Android, analysts say."It's a blow upon a bruise. It comes at a bad time," Nomura's Windsor said, referring to Wednesday's service disruption.While corporate customers were weighing their options, BlackBerry users were venting their frustration at the company and what they said was its failure to keep its customers informed."Totally appalled at the lack of communication from RIM," wrote Lynn Murdoch on RIM's BlackBerry Facebook page. "Love my Berry, but furious at the fact that no one can actually give a time frame of how long its going to take to fix. Utterly disappointed!""I'm right at the edge where I might be saying goodbye to my BlackBerry," said Tony Vitali, a BlackBerry user in New York. "The device freezes twice a day. ... It's a very frustrating device."BAD TIMINGFrom a marketing standpoint, the timing of the service glitch could hardly have been worse for RIM.Apple on Wednesday launched an major upgrade to its iOS operating system that includes iMessage, an instant messaging service for users of Apple's iPhones, iPads and some iPods. It is a direct competitor to RIM's BlackBerry Messenger, or BBM.The RIM service, which allows BlackBerry users to send free text messages to other BlackBerry users, has made the devices a popular choice with young consumers. That has partially compensated for its losses in the corporate market in North America and Western Europe.On Wednesday RIM's shares closed down 3.46 percent at C$24.27 on the Toronto Stock Exchange and down 2.17 percent at $23.88 on the Nasdaq.

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UPDATE 1-MetLife considers selling mortgage business

MetLife has also said it might sell its depository business and de-register as a bank holding company.MetLife Home Loans will continue to make traditional mortgages while the insurer decides whether to sell the business. The company said it will continue to service its mortgage clients.MetLife Home Loans, a division of MetLife Bank, began making traditional mortgages and reverse mortgages in 2008.

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UPDATE 1-MetLife considers selling mortgage business

MetLife has also said it might sell its depository business and de-register as a bank holding company.MetLife Home Loans will continue to make traditional mortgages while the insurer decides whether to sell the business. The company said it will continue to service its mortgage clients.MetLife Home Loans, a division of MetLife Bank, began making traditional mortgages and reverse mortgages in 2008.