China's business press carried the following stories on Friday. China.org.cn has not checked the stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.

India bans Chinese telecoms equipment—yicai.com

India has begun to ban telecom equipment imports from Chinese makers including Huawei Technologies and ZTE, according to a foreign media report.

The Indian government justifies the ban on national security grounds. They worry Chinese companies would embed spying devices in the telecoms networks they build there.

The move came as a blow to both Chinese vendors and Indian customers who had hoped to buy cheaper equipment from China. But the ban could help American and European makers, who have lost a lot of business to Chinese makers in India, to regain the market.

Huawei and ZTE will be definitely hard hit, because they see India as an important overseas market, said Kong Xiaoming, an analyst at iSuppli, a technology research and advisory firm.

Indian has long been wary of Chinese equipment companies. The ban will be a test of relationship between China and India.

AOL sells ICQ to Russian firm, Chinese Tencent out—Beijing Business Daily

American media giant AOL announced yesterday that the company is to sell instant messaging service ICQ to Russian Internet company Digital Sky Technologies (DST) for US$187.5 million, abandoning another bidder Chinese Tencent, one of China's largest internet companies.

The takeover price is less than US$200-250 million AOL had hoped to get.

Despite of the failed bid, Tencent can be considered an indirect shareholder of ICQ, because Tencent bought a 10 percent stake in DST two weeks ago.

AOL began to look for potential buyers for loss-making ICQ in last November. Google and Skype were reported to have shown interest in the buying.

Audit finds misconduct of three banks—Oriental Morning Post

A government audit conducted by the National Audit Office found irregularities in three state-owned banks, involving 20.301 billion yuan (US$2.98 billion) in credit issue and other operations.

The three banks are Agricultural Bank of China, Agricultural Development Bank of China and China Export & Credit Corporation.

Agricultural Bank, one of the major four state-owned lenders, was found to have misused 10.55 billion yuan (US$1.55 billion) worth of funds, including irregular loans worth 4.797 billion yuan given out to companies that didn't meet industry policy or other criteria, and 4.8 billion yuan worth of irregular bills issuance or bills financing that weren't supported by trade needs.