RIYADH, 26 August 2003 — An official at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said a meeting of a group of prominent non-governmental organizations operating in the six Gulf states including Saudi Arabia will be held on Oct. 7 this year to develop a comprehensive strategy for regional stockpiling of humanitarian relief materials and to discuss the reconstruction of war-torn Iraq.
RIYADH, 14 August 2003 — A Saudi telecommunications group last week filed a lawsuit accusing Lucent of bribing a Saudi official in order to gain business in the Kingdom. In the lawsuit filed in the New York District Court on Friday, the National Group for Communications and Computers alleges that Lucent and the Swiss company ACEC provided a former official with bribes worth an estimated $15 million between 1995 and 2002.
RIYADH, 13 August 2003 — The Philippine Embassy will seek royal clemency for a Filipina, Sarah Jane Dematera, who has been in a Saudi jail for 11 years. Sarah, who arrived in 1992 to work as a maid for a Saudi family, was charged with the murder of her employer’s wife a few days after her arrival, according to a Philippine Embassy spokesman, Ray Banda. A Saudi court found her guilty in November 1993, sentenced her to death and sent her to jail to await execution.
RIYADH, 10 August 2003 — In a move to promote Saudi participation in the health sector, especially in terms of owning and operating health clinics in the Kingdom, the Ministry of Health (MOH) has imposed tighter restrictions on the issuance of licenses.
RIYADH– The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has stepped up efforts to facilitate employment and movement of their nationals among member states. There are also plans to ease travel restrictions for the hundreds of thousands of expatriates currently living in GCC countries.
RIYADH – The Kingdom together with the other five Gulf states will have only a 0.1 percent share of the $7 trillion global e- business in 2005. This is true despite many initiatives currently in place to redress the situation and to boost Gulf countries’ participation in global online business, according to Dr. Fawaz Alamy, Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister for technical affairs and chairman of E-Commerce National Taskforce.
RIYADH- Saudi security officers on Tuesday raided several illegal telephone operations here which were offering inter- national calls at cut-price rates. They were operated from small houses in the Batha and Al-Wazarat areas of the capital. “The raids on the illegal telephone cabins were carried out by the personnel of the Passports Department and led to the detention of 16 people’ * eyewitness Abdurahman Kutty told Arab News yesterday. Kutty said that a number of other expatriates involved in such operations were deported earlier. Over 120 illegal telephone cabins currently operate in Riyadh, employing some 1,000 expatriates.
RIYADH, 21 July 2003 — A group of 868 Iraqi refugees currently living in Rafha camp, northwest of Riyadh, will be repatriated in the next few as part of the resettlement program launched by the Riyadh-based chapter of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in cooperation with the Saudi government. The refugees have been living in Rafha camp since the 1991 Gulf War.
RIYADH, 5 July 2003 — The fight against terror and security cooperation to curb infiltration and weapons smuggling to Saudi Arabia will top the agenda of the Saudi-Yemeni Coordination Council held in the Yemeni capital Sanaa today. The meeting will be co-chaired by Prince Sultan, second deputy premier and minister of defense and aviation, who heads the Saudi delegation, the Royal Court announced yesterday.
RIYADH, 30 June 2003 — In a major move to curb illegal money transactions, Saudi Arabia has asked money exchange firms not to send remittances outside the Kingdom to unknown customers or dubious business entities. The money exchange firms, on the other hand, are also currently unifying their efforts to merge and form full-fledged licensed banking entities on a par with the Kingdom’s other commercial banks which offer the whole range of banking services.