Mourinho faces tax probe call over Sunday Times claims www.bbc.com

The tax affairs of football manager Jose Mourinho should be investigated by British officials following allegations he used off-shore companies to reduce his tax bill, a UK MP has said.
Mourinho is accused of moving millions of pounds of earnings to the British Virgin Islands to avoid paying tax.
The Manchester United manager's agent said the allegations were "unfounded".
Public accounts committee chairwoman Meg Hillier told the Sunday Times the claims required "close examination".
Further claims about the tax affairs of Mourinho - as well as other top international football stars - have been made in the Sunday Times and other European newspapers.
The publications acquired leaked documents from the website Football Leaks, following a cyber attack on football agents earlier this year.
Mourinho has been accused of using "a complex web of off-shore companies" to avoid paying tax in the UK and Spain.
The allegations surround his time as manager of UK side Chelsea, between 2004 and 2007, and Spanish club Real Madrid, between 2010 and 2013.
Panama Papers explained
According to the reports, Portuguese-born Mourinho, 53, placed £10m (€12m) into a Swiss account owned by a British Virgin Islands (BVI) firm.
The newspaper claims Mourinho and his advisers deducted substantial costs for a BVI company - which it suggests has no employees.
The Sunday Times says Mourinho - as well as Real Madrid star Christiano Ronaldo - also used bank accounts and companies in Ireland, Switzerland and New Zealand to process substantial earnings for their image rights.
However, Jorge Mendes - the agent for both Mourinho and ex-Manchester United player Ronaldo - denies the claim.
He says both men were fully compliant with UK and Spanish tax rules.
The statement added that the allegations stemmed from a cyber attack earlier this year on some sports agents, details of which were prohibited by a Spanish court from being published.

The head of HMRC will appear before Ms Hillier's committee - which is responsible for overseeing government expenditure - this week.
The Labour MP told the BBC: "I think it is really important that the tax authorities take a really close look at what's gone on and we will be raising this with them on Wednesday."
She said the allegations would be "galling" for football fans who buy season tickets and spend a lot of their disposable income on watching games.
"On Wednesday, we are already examining HMRC on how they deal with high net-worth individuals and it is clear that there are issues there about the resource they have got and how they go about dealing with people with very large amounts of wealth," she said.
International consortium
The allegations surrounding Mourinho and Ronaldo are based on two terabytes of leaked information which allegedly includes original contracts.
The claims were published by an international consortium of journalists - including German newspaper Der Spiegel, Spain's El Mundo and the UK's Sunday Times - which obtained a trove of about 18m documents.
Other top players were also named in the documents.
The consortium says it intends to publish a series of articles under the banner "Football Leaks" over the next few weeks.
It comes eight months after the so-called Panama Papers lifted the lid on how the world's rich and powerful use tax havens to hide their wealth.

Real Madrid, Ronaldo's current employer, did not respond to requests from news agencies for comment.
Manchester United said the allegations related to events before Mourinho's arrival at the club and so it would not comment.
One of the papers in the consortium, the Dutch NRC, alleges that Ronaldo moved €63.5m (£53.1m, $67.7m) to the British Virgin Islands at the end of 2014.
The paper says the striker received sponsorship fees which were moved via two Irish companies to the tax haven, 11 days before Spain changed an advantageous tax law.
According to the reports, Friday's first batch of leaks centred on "a system" put in place by Mr Mendes, whose company has denied any wrongdoing.
His company, Gestifute, said in a statement that neither Ronaldo nor Mourinho "have been implicated in legal proceedings of the tax evasion commission in Spain".
The company accused the media consortium of operating in an "insidious" way concerning the stars' tax obligations.

Russian Court Freezes IKEA Accounts www.themoscowtimes.com

A court in Smolensk, north-west Russia, has frozen 9.3 billion rubles ($145 million) from the bank accounts of Swedish furniture giant IKEA.

Softbank, Huawei eye self-driving telecom system www3.nhk.or.jp

NHK has learned that Japanese and Chinese telecom giants, Softbank and Huawei, will jointly develop a communication system for self-driving vehicles.

Beijing urges Washington to stick to WTO anti-dumping agreement www.rt.com

China has called on the United States to drop the approach it uses to calculate anti-dumping measures against Chinese exports, Reuters reported. The appeal comes as China’s 15-year WTO membership agreement expires on December 11.

Russian diplomat 'beat Mongolian rapper over Swastika outfit' www.bbc.com

Switzerland's age of banking secrecy coming to an end www.rt.com

The Swiss government plans to dramatically increase international cooperation on fiscal transparency, sharing private information about clients of the country's banks.
The automatic exchange of information (AEOI) on bank accounts will be spread to 22 more countries, including Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Uruguay as well as India and South Africa, according to the Federal Department of Finance.

Hong Kong shares wipe out week's gains as U.S. yields rise www.asia.nikkei.com

Huanghua Port becomes China's largest for coal transportation www.chinadaily.com

SHIJIAZHUANG - Huanghua Port in northern Hebei province has become China's largest port for coal transportation, according to a press conference Thursday.

China's WeChat is censoring group chats www.cnn.com

One of China's most popular apps is censoring users' private messages at home and abroad, according to a new report.
WeChat messages containing keywords mentioning sensitive topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet or the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong were censored in private and group chats without users' knowledge, according to a report published by Toronto-based Citizen Lab.
"Keyword censorship is no longer transparent," the report said. "In the past, users received notifications when their message was blocked; now censorship of chat messages happens without any user notice."

That censorship extends to users living abroad linked to an account originally registered with a Chinese phone number, even if the user has switched their account to an international number.
Researcher Jason Ng said that censorship is done by phone number because that enables WeChat to target all Chinese users regardless of whether they use a virtual private network (VPN) or other means of avoiding the sprawling censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall of China.
Chinese users are censored wherever they are in the world, and regardless of who they are talking to.
"(Beijing) promotes maintaining ideological connections and guidance with Chinese citizens overseas, particularly for students studying abroad," the report said. "Tencent may be pressured to ensure filtering persists for Chinese users in any location."
Tencent (TCEHY), the tech giant that owns WeChat, said in a statement that it "respects and complies to local laws and regulations" of countries where it operates.
"WeChat...will always adhere to Tencent's core mission to create value for our users by providing high-quality, secure user experiences," the company added.
WeChat doesn't filter all messages "because they don't want international users to experience censorship," Ng said.
More keywords are blocked within group chats -- where users can broadcast their thoughts to up to 500 people at once -- than within private message groups, Citizen Lab found.

WeChat has more than 806 million monthly active users. It started as a simple messaging app, but has come to encompass gaming, mobile payments, ride hailing and e-commerce.
All Chinese social networking apps censor and restrict content by law. Citizen Lab has previously documented how WeChat deletes sensitive posts made using its "public accounts" feature, which operate like a Facebook page for businesses or celebrities.
Ng has also tracked censorship of private messages. He said in the past when a message was blocked, users received a warning note that they had used "restricted words" or that the message could not be sent "due to local laws, regulations, and policies."
In the most recent study, Citizen Lab found that the term Falun Gong was censored in a private message between a Chinese-registered account and one with a Canadian registration, but neither user was made aware that the deletion had taken place.
Ng said he "would not be surprised at all" if messages containing sensitive keywords were also being surveilled or monitored by Chinese security services.
"Censorship on WeChat (now resembles) how the Great Firewall of China operates, which is by design opaque and unaccountable," the report said.

Sharp considering closing electronics parts plant www3.nhk.or.jp