Intercultural Business News

Retired ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 looks to be headed for South Africa as a floating hotel for next summer’s football World Cup. The current owners, Nakheel, a subsidiary of Dubai World, planned to refurbish the QE2 and have it berthed at the man-made Palm Jumeirah island in Dubai, but the recession has hit the company just like many others. As a result, they are looking for ways to make additional money off the famous ship, and South Africa is in need of additional hotel rooms for the World Cup.

Could Dubai based QE2 be heading to South Africa?

The Johannesburg newspaper Business Day reported that Dubai World is looking to berth the ship at Cape Town, where it is part owner of the V&A Waterfront. However, South Africa’s National Port Authority indicated that several approvals were necessary prior to any decisions being made, according to spokesman Ronel Bester.

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FOUR European nations have signed an agreement with Turkey to construct a 2,000-mile-long, £6.9 billion gas pipeline in an attempt to diminish Europe’s dependency on Russian energy.

Inking the deal in Turkey yesterday, the countries hope that once completed the pipeline, called Nabucco, should be able to transport 31 billion cubic metres of gas a year.

Turkey Gas Pipeline

This should go some way to reducing Russia’s influence over the continent’ADVERTISEMENTs energy supplies. Moscow now provides Europe with a quarter of its gas needs, but questions marks over its reliability as a supplier have surfaced frequently.

At the start of the year a dispute between Russia and Ukraine led to pipelines closing down, and a number of European nations experiencing severe disruption to energy supplies. Russia provides more than a quarter of Europe’s gas, and 80 per cent of that moves over Ukrainian pipelines

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