Indian-born steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal is the richest man in Europe with his fortune estimated at a staggering 27.7 billion pounds, even as he emerged as Britain's wealthiest person for fourth year in a row.
Over all, the steel baron, whose wealth saw a whopping increase of 8.5 billion pounds in a year, is the sixth richest in the world, a rich-list published by the Sunday Times said on Sunday.
His company ArcelorMittal is now worth more than 57.2 billion pounds and the Mittal family's 43 per cent stake is worth 24.6 billion pounds.
According to the list, the Ambani brothers, Mukesh and Anil, although they have parted ways, together were rated as the richest in the world at a combined worth of 43 billion pounds, ahead of America's Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart (38.4 billion) and Microsoft chief Bill Gates (29 bn pounds).
There were two more Indian entries in the list of 50 richest in the world in 2008 - K P Singh (property - 15 billion pounds and Shashi and Ravi Ruia (steel, oil telecoms - 7.5 billion pounds).
Meanwhile, the Hinduja brothers, S P Hinduja and G P Hinduja, Chairman and President, respectively of the group were Britain's second richest with 6.2 billion pounds.
Leading NRI entrepreneur Lord Swraj Paul was the fourth among the ten richest Asians in Britain, the list said.
The London-based Caparo Group of 77-year-old Lord Paul, British Ambassador for Overseas Business, is making hefty investments in the booming Indian Economy.
In 2006, its profits were 55 million pounds on 660 million pounds sales.
Courtesy : THEFINANCIALEXPRESS.COM
'Mittal richest in Europe, Ambanis world's richest together'
April 28, 2008, 11:06 amResidential Property in Ahmedabad
November 1, 2007, 9:29 amChinese couple tried to name baby '@'
August 17, 2007, 10:49 am
A Chinese couple tried to name their baby '@', claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.
The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.
"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.
While the '@' simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word 'at' to sound it out -- which with a drawn out 'T' sounds something like 'ai ta', or 'love him', to Mandarin speakers.
Li told a news conference on the state of the language that the name was an extreme example of people's increasingly adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialisation and the Internet break down conventions.
Another couple tried to give their child a name that rendered into English sounds like 'King Osrina.'
Li did not say if officials accepted the '@' name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages.
Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers were left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government Web site (www.gov.cn).
One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name had a rare 'rong' character that gave newspaper editors headaches.
Courtesy : Expressindia.com
The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.
"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.
While the '@' simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word 'at' to sound it out -- which with a drawn out 'T' sounds something like 'ai ta', or 'love him', to Mandarin speakers.
Li told a news conference on the state of the language that the name was an extreme example of people's increasingly adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialisation and the Internet break down conventions.
Another couple tried to give their child a name that rendered into English sounds like 'King Osrina.'
Li did not say if officials accepted the '@' name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages.
Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers were left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government Web site (www.gov.cn).
One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name had a rare 'rong' character that gave newspaper editors headaches.
Courtesy : Expressindia.com