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KARACHI - A three-member bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan on Monday allowed out of the court settlement of the payment of the CFS arrears by the Karachi Stock Exchange brokers to the NCCPL. The SC decided this on the plea of the brokers, who informed the court they wanted an out of court settlement of the CFS issue. The SC adjourned the hearing of the case till December 30.

The process of due diligence for merger of KASB Bank with Atlas Bank will be completed within three weeks, KASB Bank President Muneer Kamal told The News on Monday. “Both banks are still carrying out valuation of each other’s balance sheets before the merger takes place,” he said. “Due diligence takes time and I think we are pretty much on track,” he said, referring to reports that the merger has been held up for some reasons. “It will be completed within 15-20 days.” KASB and Atlas banks earlier announced a merger of their operations in a bid to cope with tight liquidity environment for small banks.The merged entity with an equity of over Rs12 billion and 110 branches will have sound financial standing and wider reach to woo depositors, Atlas Bank President Aziz Rajkotwala said. The merger was supposed to be finalised by this year’s end but the banks are still evaluating the swap ratio in the merged entity, he said. “We are assessing who is going to have how many shares.” State Bank o

Continuation of losing spree remained intact even on the third business week on Monday after the removal of floor when the dilapidated Karachi Stock Exchange went further down as KSE bourse had lost 192.85 points and wrapped up at 6294.67 tumbling another 2.97 percent - meaning the market has lost about 31.5 percent of its value and made the market to lose nearly a third of its value in just two weeks. The market has been melting down since December 15, when regulators removed a “floor” on the benchmark index imposed in August to stop such colossal losses to investors and brokers. The tumbling KSE-100 shed 192.85 points to close at 6,294.67 on Monday came down under 6,500 points first time where 83 scrips recorded gain, 113 landed in the negative column and 5 scrips remained unchanged out of a total of 201 companies. As usual the bourse opened in the negative zone and remained under selling pressure throughout the business session. Volume was at 61.4 million shares ��" an improvem