Following a meeting with President Dilma Rousseff, Banco Santander Chairman Emilio Botin said that the Spanish bank has 10 billion dollars available to finance infrastructure projects in Brazil. He also anticipated that loan book growth at Banco Santander Brasil SA would be up about 10% in 2013.
Paraguayan president Horacio Cartes begins on Monday a two-day visit to Chile where he is scheduled to meet his peer Sebastián Piñera and hold a round of talks with business people inviting them to invest in Paraguay. At the end of the month Cartes will be flying to Brasilia to meet President Dilma Rousseff.
Brazil is to top the world soybean production league for the first time, thanks to the incentive to farmers provided from resilient prices and a weak Real, overtaking the US, whose hopes have been dented by drought.
Argentine Defence Minister Agustín Rossi and his Brazilian counterpart Celso Amorim issued a joint statement with cyber-defence taking the centre stage of the bilateral agenda, during the official ceremony at the Libertador building, seat of the Defence ministry in Buenos Aires.
President Dilma Rousseff is pushing new legislation that would seek to force Google, Facebook and other internet companies to store locally gathered data inside Brazil. The requirement would be difficult to execute, technology experts say, given high costs and the global nature of the Internet.
Tourism New Zealand will open a new office in Sao Paulo, Brazil to serve as the base of its new Latin American activity. The announcement was made by Prime Minister John Key and the Minister of Tourism, at the Latin American Business Council lunch this week.
President Jose Mujica said that Uruguay is ‘aligned’ with Brazil in economic policy, and if the government of President Dilma Rousseff decides to devalue its currency, “Uruguay will follow” and as Brazil, “Uruguay is not satisfied with the functioning of Mercosur”.
The 124 richest people in Brazil hold assets totalling 544 billion Reais equivalent to 238.6bn dollars or 12.3% of the country’s GDP, which is considered one of the most unequal in the world. The 124 are included in Forbes magazine latest publication that brings together all those Brazilians with fortunes over a billion Reais (approx 438 million dollars).
Reports that the United States spied on Brazilian oil company Petrobras, if proven, would be tantamount to industrial espionage and have no security justification, Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff said on Monday.
German carmaker Daimler plans to build a new Mercedes factory in Brazil to benefit from growing demand for compact cars in the country, its chief executive told a German newspaper.