Category: 3. Business

Pamela McDonald of Pinsent Masons was commenting after Qatar’s cabinet published its Decision of the Council of Ministers on Regulating Procedures for Filing Lawsuits Related to Government Entities, which requires public authorities in Qatar to take active steps to settle disputes before formally requesting to initiate a lawsuit.

The decision, published on 2 February in the Official Gazette, states that any “government entity must, before requesting to initiate a Lawsuit, take initiatives for reconciliation and settlement”. The decision defines a “lawsuit” as “a dispute or claim brought by or against the government entity”. 

The law imposes a statutory obligation on all government entities and public bodies to make and document settlement efforts prior to escalation. They will be required to provide all necessary documents, records, information or data in order to obtain approval from the Department of State Affairs at the Ministry of Justice to initiate the lawsuit.

Where settlement is achieved, the ministerial department will ensure parties fulfil their obligations in accordance with the agreed terms.

The law also states that, if settlement efforts are unsuccessful, the public authority must refer the request to initiate the lawsuit and also provide documents and records, including an explanation for why reconciliation and settlement was not possible.

Article 3 of the decision sets out that, after obtaining the relevant approval, the minister, head of the relevant government body or authority may initiate settlement efforts at any stage of a claim process.

There are two limitations on permission for lawsuits outlined in article 5. These state that permission will not be given if the value of the claim does not exceed QAR 50,000, or if there is insufficient documentation and evidence necessary to support the lawsuit.

McDonald, a specialist in international arbitration, said the new law was a “helpful development” in Qatar’s dispute resolution landscape and “will be attractive to prospective and current foreign investors in Qatar’s economy.”

The law is particularly crucial because government entities in Qatar often play an important role in initiating a lawsuit even where they are the defendant or respondent party. This is a result of article 2.2 of Qatar’s Arbitration Law of 2017, which requires arbitration agreements in contracts with a public entity to be approved by the prime minister to be deemed valid. 

This can result in the authority requesting the prime minister’s office for approval to arbitrate claims being advanced against it. Read in this context, McDonald says the decision’s reference to the government entity “requesting to initiate a Lawsuit” can refer to claims that a public authority wishes either to prosecute or defend.

She also said the decision is yet another demonstration of Qatar’s ongoing commitment to supporting alternative dispute resolution methods since the introduction of a dedicated mediation law in November 2021. “Helpfully, article 4 of the decision references both general reconciliation efforts as well as the use of mediation,” she added. “This further underlines Qatar’s emphasis on the importance of mediation as an alternative dispute resolution method.”

Lam Le is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

As TikTok finalized a sale to United States investors in January, the platform was penalized in Vietnam, where authorities fined it 880 million dong ($33,800) for misleading users about data practices.

Both countries had threatened to ban TikTok over user safety. But while the US forced the company to divest its American operations over fears of Chinese political influence, Vietnam has taken a different route, using law enforcement and interagency pressure to push the platform to censor content it deems toxic.

Vietnam’s Competition Commission fined TikTok following an inspection of its compliance with consumer protection laws. The agency found that the platform had failed to establish a mechanism for users to consent to how their personal data is used, included prohibited clauses in its standard terms and conditions, misled users about the nature of their transactions with business entities, and failed to provide a complaints and redress mechanism for vulnerable groups. TikTok said it has begun making adjustments to comply with the regulator’s recommendations.

“At a high level, I think both the US and Vietnam appear to be pursuing a similar goal: preventing sensitive user data from being controlled by service providers outside the country,” said Diyi Liu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Tracking and Society at the University of Copenhagen. But that goal alone, as recent privacy incidents have made clear, does not translate to ‘stronger privacy protections for users, and under certain conditions may even undermine them,” Liu added.

US-based TikTok users confronted this reality when the app required them to consent to more granular data collection, including geolocation, or lose access. The move prompted calls to delete TikTok in protest and pushed some users toward alternative platforms independent of Big Tech, such as Upscroll. “Restructuring TikTok may reduce foreign-control risk, but it doesn’t change the platform’s incentives to collect more data,” Ronni K. Gothard Christiansen, Technical Privacy Engineer and CEO at consent management platform AesirX.io, told Tech Policy Press. “Divestment is a sovereignty remedy, not a privacy remedy.”

In Vietnam, the timing of the TikTok fine coincided with another 810 million dong ($31,300) fine imposed on VNG, which owns Zalo, the country’s most popular messaging app. The move followed public backlash over Zalo’s ‘take it or leave it ’update to its terms of use last December.

Users were given an ultimatum: accept all terms governing how their data is collected, stored, and shared, or face account deletion within 45 days. The backlash drove a surge in downloads of WhatsApp and Viber as users explored alternatives, some going as far as boycotting Zalo, despite its central role in daily life in Vietnam, from personal communication and shopping to business dealings and government announcements.

“Vietnam fining TikTok and Zalo on the same day is a clear signal about governability: the state is enforcing consumer choice and transparency around commercial use of personal data,” Christiansen said. “The fines are modest, but the precedent is clear — platform consent can’t just be a checkbox or a take-it-or-leave-it condition.”

It was also a symbolic move that has had a calming effect on the public, Nguyen Quang Dong, director of Hanoi-based Institute for Policy Studies and Media Development, told Tech Policy Press.

Vietnam’s Personal Data Protection Law only came into effect in January this year, so it could not be used as the basis for fining Zalo. Instead, it was the Competition Commission, an antitrust government body, that fined the tech platforms, under the guise of protecting consumer rights.

“In the area of handling locally unlawful and harmful content, Vietnamese authorities have, over several years, demonstrated a strong capacity to discipline platforms operating in a large domestic market through coordinated, top-down inspections and enforcement actions,” said Liu.

Unlike the US, Vietnam does not have the political or economic leverage to compel a TikTok sale. Neither does it have the scale and resources like China to build its own social media platform, as multiple failed attempts have shown. What the country does have is leverage in terms of market access — a rapidly growing economy of 100 million people — that it has proven over the years to be enough to compel foreign platforms to comply with its demands.

Back in 2023, Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications launched a probe into TikTok over content it deemed “to pose a threat to the country’s youth, culture and tradition,” warning that non-compliance could result in cutting the platform off advertisers, banks and e-commerce revenue, or even a blanket ban. The authorities later concluded that TikTok had failed to protect children’s privacy and had allowed “illegal content” to spread. This includes content that opposes the state, insults national symbols, incites violence, or spreads false information that causes public disorder, as per Vietnam’s cybersecurity law. TikTok signed an admission of wrongdoing and pledged corrective action, state media reported.

Not just TikTok, but also Facebook and YouTube, have consistently complied with over 90% of Vietnamese government takedown requests.

Before 2020, enforcement of user privacy mostly took a back seat compared to online censorship in Vietnam. The government’s focus on user privacy since then, Dong said, reflects not just the country playing catch-up toward more comprehensive governance of online platforms, but also rising public pressure, driven by data leaks and online scams, courtesy of scam compounds in neighboring Cambodia.

The Vietnamese government’s success in using state power and market leverage to compel foreign platforms to censor unlawful content now serves as a blueprint for pressuring companies to take user privacy and consent more seriously — reinforcing the one-party state’s control over online speech.

The US approach, by contrast, has focused on restructuring ownership rather than shaping platform behavior. The transfer of control over TikTok’s US operations to domestic firms has heightened privacy concerns by shifting “who controls and can compel access to the data, and under what safeguards,” Christiansen said, without fundamentally altering the platform’s data-collection incentives.

Beyond privacy, the sale has raised new national security questions. TikTok US is now jointly controlled by private equity firm Silver Lake, software giant Oracle, and Emirati investment firm MGX, each holding a 15% stake. Critics have pointed out that it merely transfers control to US corporations politically aligned with the current administration in a system where the likes of Meta, Google and Amazon have used surveillance and algorithms to “influence what we think, do, and consume,” Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a DC-based NGO, argued.

US TikTok users are already accusing the platform of increased censorship of pro-Palestinian content. Days after the sale, Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda, who had 1.4 million followers on TikTok, said her account had been banned.

“National security isn’t only about where data sits or who owns the shares — it’s also about the recommendation system,” Christiansen said. “When a platform can shape attention and belief at scale, algorithm governance becomes a security and fundamental-rights issue alongside data governance.”

Insider Brief

• Orange Business and Cisco have launched post-quantum cryptography (PQC)–secured network services on Orange’s global infrastructure to protect enterprise and public-sector data from future quantum threats.
• Orange Business is the first European service provider to offer PQC-secured global WAN services using Cisco 8000 Series Secure Routers, with managed Cisco SD-WAN PQC services planned for commercial availability in Q3 2026.
• The collaboration focuses on crypto-agile, centrally managed SD-WAN architectures designed to mitigate “harvest now, decrypt later” risks as quantum computing advances.

PRESS RELEASE — Orange Business and Cisco are announcing today their collaboration on Post-Quantum Cryptography- (PQC) secured solutions over the Orange Business global network infrastructure. This provides customers, from enterprises to public sector, with long-term protection against future quantum attacks for their network traffic.

Orange Business is the first European service provider to announce PQC-secured global network services based on Cisco 8000 Series Secure Routers. These are specifically designed for the quantum era, providing robust, quantum-safe network connectivity. 

As of today, PQC-secured WAN services are available. PQC-secured Orange Business managed Cisco SD-WAN services are targeted for commercial availability in CY Q3 2026. Customers can trust that sensitive data moving across organizations, the cloud, and data centers remains secure, even against the threat of quantum computing.

As quantum computing advances, many widely used classical cryptographic algorithms will become increasingly vulnerable. This creates the risk that data intercepted today could be decrypted in the future, known as the “Harvest now, Decrypt Later” threat. Customers need to act now to avoid such exposure. PQC integrated into Cisco SD-WAN infrastructures is easy for customers to implement as a software feature – particularly as a managed service. It will help customers protect their data and operations against both current and future threats. 

PQC integrated into SD-WAN makes the SD-WAN infrastructure and its control and data planes quantum-safe, ensuring the way sites connect, authenticate, and exchange keys to remain secure. The benefit of PQC integrating into SD-WAN is that it future-proofs the entire WAN, not just individual tunnels. This gives customers a single, centrally managed, quantum-resilient WAN that can evolve as standards change.

The Latest Building Block in the Orange Quantum Defender Portfolio

PQC over Cisco SD-WAN is the latest addition in the Orange Quantum Defender range of solutions, reinforcing Orange’s leadership in quantum-safe networking. Orange is focused on preparing enterprise and critical infrastructure customers for the future impact of quantum computing by embedding post-quantum security into network security early, rather than viewing it as an upgrade later on. 

The Orange quantum-safe networking strategy emphasizes crypto-agility, ensuring that networks are designed to allow for the quick alteration or upgrade of cryptographic algorithms and protocols, thereby minimizing disruption and maintaining confidentiality over long data lifecycles. 

A Step-By-Step Approach

By taking a standards-aligned approach to quantum-safe networking with PQC over SD-WAN, Orange and Cisco are helping customers protect their operations and maintain customer trust in the future. The goal is to ensure that data communications and digital services remain secure, even as quantum security threats evolve, without requiring customers to undergo sudden, disruptive changes.

Jean-Noël is responsible for the product portfolio and engineering of connectivity, communication, collaboration, contact centers and professional services. He has more than 25 years of experience in the telecom industry. Prior to joining Orange Business, he was responsible for product innovation for B2B markets across Orange Group and has led leadership roles at Orange in service platforms, IT, B2B, marketing and business development.

Vikas leads product strategy, roadmap, and development for Cisco Routing and SD-WAN, Industrial Networking, Industrial Cyber Security, and Multicloud Networking. As networking and security become more tightly integrated, Vikas has led the implementation of an SD-WAN offering with comprehensive security built-in. Bringing all these technologies together with the Cisco Networking Cloud vision, Vikas is helping customers simplify, secure, and scale their businesses.

London, 10 February 2026 – GP Bullhound is pleased to announce six senior promotions across the firm and extends its warmest congratulations to our newly promoted colleagues. These promotions reflect the depth of our senior leadership team and the long-term commitment our people bring to clients globally.

We are also delighted to welcome Greg Stucker as Director, San Francisco, further reinforcing our senior dealmaking capability and global platform.

Ale Casartelli – promoted to Partner
Ale joined GP Bullhound in 2011 as an Analyst and has grown into a trusted senior advisor across Business Software and Consumer Technology. With more than a decade of investment banking experience, he has led 30+ M&A and capital raising transactions for some of the most prominent global internet, software, and media businesses, including Spotify, Avito, Believe Digital, Jellyfish, Baltics Classified Group, and MiQ.

Prior to GP Bullhound, Alessandro worked at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London. He holds an MSc in Corporate Finance from ESADE Business School and a degree in Economics and Management from Bocconi University.

Simon Miremadi – promoted to Partner
Simon joined GP Bullhound in 2015 as an Analyst and has played a key role in building and deepening client relationships across Europe and the US, including time in our Berlin and San Francisco offices. Over his ten-year tenure at GP Bullhound, he has advised a range of high-profile clients including Urban Sports Club, Eversports, Motif, Signavio, 7NXT, Flightright, and Uberall.

Prior to GP Bullhound, Simon gained experience at MCF Corporate Finance, Woodside Capital Partners, and Deutsche Bank. He holds an MBA from California State University and a BSc in International Business from ESB Business School in Reutlingen.

Jaime Sendagorta – promoted to Managing Director

Jaime joined GP Bullhound in 2017 as an Associate and has developed into a senior leader across our Consumer Technology and Business Software practices. With 10+ years of experience in the technology industry, he has led numerous successful M&A and fundraising transactions, supporting founders and management teams through complex, high-stakes outcomes.

Prior to GP Bullhound, Jaime began his investment banking career at Credit Suisse in London (EMEA TMT). He holds a dual bachelor’s degree in Law and Business Administration & Management from ICADE, Madrid, and completed two study exchange placements, first at the University of San Diego and then at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Pierce Lewis-Oakes – promoted to Managing Director

Pierce began his GP Bullhound journey as an Intern in 2015, marking the start of a decade-plus career at the firm and a track record of consistently delivering for clients. He has closed 20+ transactions representing over US$3 billion of enterprise value and advises across consumer and enterprise software. Notable transactions include Flo Health’s US$230 million investment from General Atlantic, Falcon’s sale to Cision, and FATMAP’s sale to Strava.

Pierce holds a BA in Political Science from The George Washington University, where he was awarded a Presidential Academic Scholarship.

Gerry Kelliher – promoted to Director

Gerry joined GP Bullhound in 2021 and brings experience across investment banking and private equity. He started his career at Citi and most recently worked at Alliant Partners, a specialist technology investment bank, and Pantheon Ventures, a fund-of-funds focused on infrastructure and real assets. Gerry holds a BA in Finance and Economics from the University of Notre Dame.

Nansi Nistorova – promoted to Director

Nansi has extensive experience advising on mergers and acquisitions, growth capital raises, and restructurings. Since 2018, she has completed a double-digit number of technology transactions, supporting a diverse client base, from fast-growing VC/PE-backed companies and founder-led businesses to multinational companies.

Prior to joining GP Bullhound, Nansi worked in the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications (TMT) teams at STOUT and Stifel Europe (formerly ACXIT Capital Partners), advising clients across a wide range of strategic and financial transactions.

These promotions underscore our dedication to excellence and our strategic vision for the future. Congratulations to all our newly promoted team members.

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Insider Brief

• Researchers experimentally demonstrated deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication over 20.121 km of optical fiber, extending dense coding from laboratory-scale tests to metropolitan-scale distances.
• The work uses an improved continuous-variable quantum dense coding scheme that independently transmits entangled states and local oscillator beams to reduce fiber noise and prevent decoding with classical coherent states alone.
• Measurements show higher signal-to-noise ratios and increased channel capacity than classical communication across long fiber links, particularly at larger average photon numbers.
• Schematic of the experimental setup for continuous-variable entanglement-assisted quantum comumication. (Xiaolong Su et al.)

PRESS RELEASE — Entanglement-assisted quantum communication has substantial advantages in surpassing the power of classical communication by utilizing the entangled state. As a typical entanglement-assisted quantum communication encoding scheme, quantum dense coding enables two communication parties to enhance the channel capacity with the shared quantum entanglement. In continuous-variable quantum dense coding, the classical signals are encoded on both amplitude and phase quadratures of one entangled beam. Owing to the deterministic advantage in the generation and detection of continuous-variable entangled states, the combination of continuous-variable quantum dense coding enables the implementation of deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication.

Since the first experimental demonstration of quantum dense coding with entangled photon pairs, it has been experimentally demonstrated in several physical systems, including optical system, nuclear magnetic resonance system, and atomic system. However, most demonstrations of entanglement-assisted quantum communication with dense coding still remain in proof-of-principle experiments. The implementation of quantum dense coding in practical fiber channels is of great significance for advancing the practicalization of quantum communication. Therefore, it is urgent to carry out research on entanglement-assisted quantum communication with quantum dense coding in fiber channels.

In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications, a team of scientists, led by Professor Xiaolong Su from State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics Technologies and Devices, Institute of Opto-Electronics, Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University, China and co-workers experimentally demonstrated the deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication in fiber channels. Compared to previous proof-of-principle experiments, they extended the transmission distance of deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication from meters to 20.121 km, which has potential applications in metropolitan quantum communication.

They proposed an improved continuous-variable dense coding scheme, where Alice (sender) adjusts the amplitude of the classical signals according to the transmission efficiency to ensure that the received signals can not be decoded by using the coherent state at Bob’s (receiver) station. Moreover, by transmitting entangled state and local oscillator beam independently to reduce the excess noise in the fiber channel, they experimentally demonstrated the deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication in 20-km fiber channels. They introduced the details of the experiment as follows.

“The experimental setup is illustrated in Fig. 1. At Alice’s station, the generated Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entangled state is first coupled into the fiber. Subsequently, Alice modulates two classical signals on an ancilla coherent beam simultaneously by the fiber amplitude and phase modulators, respectively, and then couples the modulated ancilla beam and one of the entangled states on a 99:1 fiber beamsplitter to realize the encoding process. Finally, Alice transmits the entangled states to Bob through two independent fiber channels. At Bob’s station, he couples the two  entangled beams on a 50:50 beam splitter. The amplitude and phase quadratures of the output beams from the 50:50 beam splitter are simultaneously measured by two homodyne detectors to realize the decoding process”.

“We encode 10 weak classical signals with different frequencies, including 5 amplitude signals and 5 phase signals, by applying the frequency division multiplexing technique as shown in Fig. 2a. With the help of the continuous-variable quantum entanglement, we successfully decode the 10 weak classical signals simultaneously, as shown in Fig. 2b and 2c. Since the correlated noises of the entangled state are lower than the corresponding shot noise limit (vacuum noise), the noise background of entanglement-assisted quantum communication is decreased, the weak classical signals that submerged in the vacuum noise are decoded, thereby the signal-to-noise ratios are increased.”

 “The channel capacity of deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication is shown in Fig. 3. The results show that the channel capacity of entanglement-assisted quantum communication with improved signals and entanglement-assisted quantum communication is increased compared to classical communication using coherent state. The channel capacities of entanglement-assisted quantum communication based on quantum dense coding at the different transmission distances are higher than that of classical communication with coherent state in the case of large average photon number.” they added.

Europeans are booking fewer trips to the US, Europe’s biggest travel operator has said, as appetite for long-haul travel wanes and concerns linger around Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Tui, which receives most of its bookings from customers in Europe, has seen “significantly lower demand” for travel into the US, according to its chief executive, Sebastian Ebel.

“What we do see is growing business to the Emirates and Asia,” he said. “We also see European demand to the Caribbean, which – due to capacity – had not been the biggest priority in the past, but there we see now potential again to grow.”

It comes amid signs that demand for long-haul travel across the Atlantic is waning.

A report by the European Travel Commission, which surveyed travellers from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, South Korea and the US, found 42% of long-haul travellers were considering a trip to Europe this year, down from 45% last year. In the US, only 34% intended to travel to Europe, down from 37%.

In Europe, several countries have issued advisories about travel to the US owing to stricter border scrutiny, the detention of some visitors and protests over the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

Since Trump took office, reports have emerged from US border of tourists being detained and interrogated, people with work permits sent to ICE detention centres and people being wrongly deported.

Overseas visits to the US from western Europe were down 4% in December compared with the same month last year, according to the US National Travel and Tourism Office.

Last year, Ebel said Tui had seen a “significant decline” in travel to the US, owing to a multitude of factors including “the atmosphere, what you hear from border control”.

While demand for US holidays has been weaker, Tui hailed its best first quarter in just over a decade.

The German travel operator, which is headquartered in Hanover and employs about 67,000 people around the world, reported a 1% rise in revenue to €4.9bn (£4.3bn) in the quarter ending in December, and a 7.5% rise in operating profit to €72.9m.

Aarin Chiekrie, an analyst at the investment broker Hargreaves Lansdown, said much of the success came from its cruise business, where profits rose by more than 70%.

“Consumers continue to prioritise travel, which has seen Tui’s occupancy rates rise despite its fleet expansion,” he said. “All other business segments saw profitability improve over the period, except hotels and resorts, which suffered a double-digit decline due to losses resulting from the Jamaican hurricane, and the non-repeat of some one-off benefits last year.”

Shares in Tui, which is listed in Frankfurt, ticked up 0.4% in early trading on Tuesday. The stock has risen by about 10% in the past year.