KUALA LUMPUR (March 11): The government has been granted a stay of execution pending its appeal in the case of activist Amri Che Mat, who went missing almost a decade ago. She also concurred with the government's argument that there were special circumstances to grant a stay. He was referring to the RM 3 million awarded by the High Court in its November 2025 judgement. However, Surendra stressed that they were objecting to the government’s request for a stay on the High Court’s order for investigations to continue. She argued that special circumstances exist for a stay because this specific order by the High Court was unconstitutional and beyond its jurisdiction.

HONG KONG (March 11): Morgan Stanley has started hiring contract staff in Hong Kong to handle a surge in stock listings, aiming to control costs while meeting stronger demand in the Asian financial hub, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. The team participates in due diligence work for Hong Kong and US IPOs, mainly for Chinese companies, including conducting site visits and due diligence meetings, according to the sources. The bank's hiring of contract staff in Hong Kong has not been previously reported. War in the Middle East has weighed on sentiment, affecting the market debuts of three Chinese companies in Hong Kong this week and clouding the outlook for IPOs after a strong start to the year. Hong Kong was the world's top listing venue in 2025 with IPO proceeds surging 231% to US$37.4 billion and total equity capital market fundraising rose 164% to US$103 billion, according to data from the Hong Kong stock exchange.

KUALA LUMPUR (March 11): Malaysia has reached a milestone in sustainable digital infrastructure with the country’s first hyperscale data centre receiving provisional GreenRE Platinum certification for water, energy and sustainability design. The ZDATA facility is currently the only data centre in Malaysia to obtain this certification. The development previously received the Malaysia Green Data Centre Recycled Water Certification in August 2025 in recognition of its use of reclaimed water in large-scale digital infrastructure operations. The reclaimed water system allows cooling operations to run without using domestic potable water, reducing pressure on local freshwater resources. Beyond water sustainability, the data centre has been designed to achieve high energy efficiency standards and is expected to be largely powered by renewable energy.

(March 11): The UK Navy said three vessels were hit with suspected projectiles in the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf on Wednesday, as the conflict in the region continues to menace shipping. A fire aboard the cargo ship has been extinguished and there’s no environmental impact at this time, it said. The near-standstill has forced some of the biggest Gulf producers to lower oil output as storage tanks start to fill. The US has promised naval escorts to secure shipping in the region but hasn’t yet conducted any such operation. The White House on Tuesday refuted a since-deleted social media post by Energy Secretary Chris Wright that said the US Navy successfully escorted a tanker through the strait.

KUALA LUMPUR (March 11): The Dewan Negara on Wednesday passed the Capitation Grant Bill 2026, which seeks to amend the rates of grant allocated according to the population of each state based on a new rates structure. The Bill was passed by a majority voice vote after being tabled by Liew for its second and third readings in the Dewan Negara after being debated by 15 senators. Capitation grants are federal funds provided to states based on population size. The last amendment to the grant rates was made 24 years ago, in 2002. The Dewan Negara sitting continues on Thursday.

(March 11): World governments stepped up efforts to calm energy markets as the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a pivotal supply route, showed no sign of ending and Iran continued attacks across the region. Still, those discussions and US President Donald Trump’s assertion earlier this week that the US is close to achieving its military goals have eased the surge in energy prices. A day earlier, energy markets whipsawed amid rapidly shifting comments from the Trump administration over the war. Oil prices plummeted after Energy Secretary Chris Wright erroneously posted — and then deleted — a message that the US Navy had escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz. US lawmakers showed deep partisan division on the war on Tuesday, as senators left a classified briefing with Pentagon officials.

Since they make mostly floating-rate loans, Blue Owl, Apollo Global Management and Blackstone and their peers earn more as rates keep going up. Blue Owl is one of the largest pure-play private credit firms and among the fastest-growing players in the US. Blue Owl focuses on loans to private equity-backed firms or lending to private equity firms themselves against their fund assets. One reason why insurance costs are soaring is because private equity and private credit firms have been buying up insurance firms. ­Analysts say their main worry is that the loans Blue Owl sold were the good ones.

(March 11): Digital commerce in India has become a theatre of quiet deception. Sellers cheat by design and in the rush of a 10-minute grocery delivery, hundreds of millions of consumers rarely notice they are being fleeced. Yet this innovation is being hijacked by “dark patterns” — design elements that trick users into overpaying or paying for things they never wanted. Everyone from legacy banks and duopolistic airlines to venture-backed startups is gaming the digital interface to extract a psychological tax. A fundamental disregard for an individual’s choice and data sovereignty is the dark side of India’s digital gold rush.

For each day the disruption continues, roughly three Qatari LNG cargoes are effectively removed from the market, according to Bloomberg calculations based on 2025 output data. Combined, the outages amount to about 20% of global LNG supply. BloombergNEF data show that global LNG imports totaled eight million tonnes last week, down 26% from the previous week. During the same period, LNG supply declined 16%. The situation is diminishing the odds that a long-awaited LNG supply glut will materialise this year.

BENGALURU (March 11): OpenAI plans to soon launch its artificial intelligence (AI) video generator Sora in ChatGPT, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Sora, which expanded OpenAI's foray into multimodal AI technologies, competes with text-to-video tools from Meta and Alphabet's Google. OpenAI launched Sora as a standalone app in September 2025. The AI firm will continue to operate the Sora stand-alone app, The Information said. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

MIRI (March 11): A man was jailed for 10 months and fined RM50,000 by the Sessions Court here on Wednesday after he pleaded guilty to posting a grossly offensive comment on Facebook relating to Islam and the late Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi last April. He was charged under Section 233(1)(a) of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 (CMA 1998) for knowingly initiating the transmission of a grossly offensive communication using the Facebook account “Bat Tuo Sai”. The comment was detected at about 11pm the same day at Level 8, Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) Tower 1, Cyberjaya, Selangor. The prosecution further highlighted that amendments to the CMA had increased the maximum fine tenfold and doubled the maximum imprisonment term. After considering the accused's mitigation and the aggravating factors presented by the prosecution, the court sentenced him to 10 months’ jail starting from Wednesday and a RM50,000 fine, in default three months’ imprisonment.

The moves are meant to counter tariffs, slumping sales in China and Porsche’s costly course correction on electric vehicles. Still, sales for this year are set to decline slightly to at best €36 billion (RM164.76 billion), the luxury-car maker said Wednesday. Porsche needs to make “hard decisions that are both necessary and vital to address our bloated cost structure”, Leiters said. The company previously said it expects improvements in 2026 after last year’s trough. The company previously agreed to reduce headcount by some 3,900 people by the end of the decade, including 2,000 temporary workers.

KUALA LUMPUR (March 11): Hong Leong Islamic Bank is now known as HLB Islamic as it transitions to a refreshed consumer-facing brand identity, with the intention of growing the shariah-compliant franchise into a primary growth engine of the bank. The bank also strengthened its core proposition by approaching financial services as total stewardship through a shariah-principle-guided, life-cycle approach, known as Hayat @ HLB Islamic, instead of offering siloed products with a transactional mindset. Hong Leong Bank Bhd (HLB) (KL:HLBANK) group managing director and chief executive officer Kevin Lam said HLB Islamic serves as a unified gateway for all financial needs within the broader Hong Leong Financial Group ecosystem. According to a statement, Hayat @ HLB Islamic integrates the bank's comprehensive product suite into a single, cohesive journey, aligned with the five pillars of Islamic wealth stewardship: wealth creation, accumulation, protection, purification and distribution. Grounded in Maqasid al-Shariah foundations, Hayat @ HLB Islamic integrates the full arc of a life journey, from a child's first savings to legacy planning, ensuring the path is not only profitable, but purposeful.

This rise in digital activity underscores the region’s wider shift, with e-commerce, digital payments, and data-driven services driving an economy expected to surpass US$2 trillion (RM7.85 trillion) by 2030. Recent developments include the introduction of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) acceptance in Malaysia, which will enable Indian travellers to make seamless payments as though they were back home. With direct methods like UPI, merchants can reduce international transaction fees by more than 50%, significantly lowering the cost of accepting cross-border payments. To move beyond these well-known challenges, we must implement practical solutions that meet rural businesses where they are. Lastly, many rural businesses have a fear of data breaches.

Cliffwater LLC just became the latest to come under pressure, with its US$33 billion flagship private credit fund facing redemption requests. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that JPMorgan Chase & Co has told private credit lenders that it marked down the value of some loans. Just days before that, Blackstone Inc allowed investors to redeem a record 7.9% of shares from its flagship fund, known as BCRED. But “if you’re in the more problematic loans, whether they’re private or traded bank loans, then it’s going to be very difficult for that borrower to refinance themselves,” he said. Pimco has been among the early critics of private credit.