Britain's state-rescued Lloyds Banking Group has agreed to sell its asset management business Scottish Widows Investment Partnership Group to Aberdeen Asset Management for up to £660 million, it said on Monday.

The sale, worth the equivalent of $1.06 billion or 789 million euros in shares and cash, does not include Scottish Widows, the group's core life, pensions and investment business, Lloyds said in a statement.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has demanded the government halt what he described as a "virtual takeover" of Virgin Australia by foreign airlines, saying they were working to destabilize the national carrier.

Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand and Abu Dhabi-based Etihad already own 63 percent of Qantas' main domestic rival and under a Aus$350 million (U.S.$328 million) capital raising announced last week, that could increase to as much as 72 percent.

Oil prices dipped in Asian trade Monday on profit-taking and ahead of fresh international talks on Iran's nuclear program, analysts said.

New York's main contract, West Texas Intermediate for delivery in December, fell 31 cents to $93.53, while Brent North Sea crude for January was also down 31 cents at $108.19.

Arab and African foreign ministers met in Kuwait on Sunday hoping to accelerate a strategy to bolster economic cooperation, investment and trade ahead of a summit this week.

The Third Africa Arab Summit on Tuesday and Wednesday will be the first meeting of its kind since 2010, when leaders met in Libya prior to the Arab Spring uprisings that toppled longstanding dictatorships there and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East.

U.S. aerospace giant Boeing said Saturday it holds nearly 40 percent of the lucrative sales market in the Middle East and aims to increase its share.

"Today we probably have close to 40 percent" of the Middle East market, compared with 60 percent for European competitor Airbus, said Marty Bentrott, a regional sales chief for Boeing.

Berber protesters have ended their occupation of a gas terminal in western Libya that prompted the shutdown of an export pipeline to Italy, Libya's National Oil Company said on Saturday.

The protesters called off their more than two-week sit-in at the Mellitah terminal near Zwara, west of Tripoli, late on Friday but it will take longer to reopen the pipeline, NOC spokesman Mohamed al-Harairi told Agence France Presse.

EU finance ministers narrowed Friday some of their differences over "Banking Union", a new framework meant to prevent a repetition of the financial meltdown that plunged Europe into crisis.

But ministers scaled back initial plans to hammer away at a still long list of obstacles deep into the night, leaving the clock ticking on much-needed compromises if EU leaders' timetable is to be respected.

Forbes Media, a prominent chronicler of great wealth through its magazine and other media, has put itself up for sale, the company's chief executive said Friday.

The family-owned Forbes hired Deutsche Bank to represent it after receiving a number of informal inquiries from possible suitors in recent months, Forbes Media CEO Mike Perlis said in a memo to employees.

JPMorgan Chase said Friday it had reached a deal with 21 institutional investors to pay $4.5 billion for losses on mortgage securities it and Bear Stearns sold before the financial crisis.

JPMorgan said the deal would settle investors' claims that the bank and Bear Stearns, which it took over at the outset of the crisis, had misrepresented the asset quality of 330 residential mortgage-backed securities the investors were sold.

As the greatest urbanization drive in history swells China's cities with ranks of identikit apartment blocks, one culinary businessman is indulging his architectural appetite with a visual feast of extravagant, outlandish castles.

"I don't have any hobbies, except for planting trees and building castles," said Liu Chonghua, standing on a crenelated turret atop the largest of the six he has constructed.