Iran's oil minister on Tuesday dismissed an output freeze deal between the world's top two producers Saudi Arabia and Russia as "a joke," the ISNA news agency reported.

"Some neighboring countries have increased their production over the years to 10 million barrels per day and export this amount, then say let's all freeze our oil production," Bijan Zanganeh said.

U.S. chocolate giant Mars Tuesday ordered a massive international recall of Mars and Snickers bars made at its Dutch factory after a piece of plastic found in one snack was traced back to the site.

Millions of chocolate bars were deemed possibly unsafe for consumption in 55 countries after a customer in Germany found a piece of red plastic in his Snickers bar last month. 

UFI, the global association of the exhibition industry, is set to hold its annual Middle East Open Seminar in Lebanon this year.

Under the auspices of H.E Dr Alain Hakim, Minister of Economy and Trade in Lebanon, who will greet delegates in a welcome address, the seminar will run from 23 to 24 March 2016 at the Rotana Gefinor Hotel in Beirut.

The leader of Africa's number one oil producer was in Saudi Arabia Tuesday, with analysts forecasting his country's eventual support for an output freeze to stabilize prices.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is to meet King Salman before travelling on to Qatar.

Germany ran up a record surplus in its public finances in 2015, with Europe's biggest economy showing "solid and consistent" growth last year, the federal statistics office said on Tuesday.

Germany notched up an overall surplus of 19.4 billion euros ($21 billion) on its public budgets last year, "which in absolute terms is the highest since unification" in 1990, the office said in a statement.

A subsidiary of state-owned Irish airport operator daa has won the bid to operate Saudi Arabia's first privately run terminal, official media in the kingdom and the company said Monday.

Colm Moran, CEO of daa International, signed the deal to manage and operate Riyadh's Terminal 5 with Sulaiman al-Hamdan, president of regulator the General Authority of Civil Aviation, the Saudi Press Agency said.

The International Monetary Fund chief urged on Monday oil-exporting Gulf countries to introduce taxes, warning that low crude prices are likely to stay for an "extended period".

Gulf economies "need to strengthen their fiscal frameworks and reengineer their tax systems by reducing their heavy reliance on oil revenues and by boosting non-hydrocarbon sources of revenues," Christine Lagarde told a forum in Abu Dhabi.

Branches of at least three Russian banks have been attacked during a spate of weekend violence across Ukraine that coincided with the second anniversary of the ouster of Kiev's Moscow-backed leadership.

The latest incidents occurred overnight Sunday in Lviv -- a nationalist bastion in the west of the former Soviet republic -- where unknown assailants torched the central city office of Russia's top bank Sberbank.

Banks in the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are being increasingly challenged by a liquidity squeeze resulting from low oil prices, Moody's Investor Services said on Monday.

A sustained loss in oil revenue is likely to reduce government and government-related deposits in banks and could eventually reduce state support for the banking system, the ratings agency said.

China's overcapacity in heavy industries is wreaking "far-reaching" damage on the global economy, with steel production "completely untethered" from market demand, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said Monday.

The Asian giant's steel industry manufactures more than the next four largest producers combined -- Japan, India, the U.S., and Russia -- the chamber said in a report, warning that more than 60 percent of China's aluminium industry has negative cash flow.