Cyprus's cabinet on Wednesday approved the island's 10-billion-euro EU-IMF bailout deal that will now be tabled before parliament for a vote expected to be held before mid-May.

"The Cabinet has approved the loan agreement and the Memorandum to be forwarded to parliament for a preliminary discussion at committee level," government spokesman Christos Stylianides told reporters.

The UAE's giant telecom operator, Etisalat, said it will submit on Wednesday a bid to buy Vivendi's 53-percent stake in Morocco's operator Maroc Telecom.

Emirates Telecommunications Corp "will submit today a binding offer to Vivendi Group to acquire all its shares in Itissalat Al-Maghrib (Maroc Telecom)," the group said in a statement to the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange.

The board of Indian carrier Jet Airways said Wednesday it had agreed to sell a near 32 percent stake in the group to Abu Dhabi-based Etihad in a deal worth 20.4 billion rupees ($380 million).

The acquisition, which still needs to be approved by Jet shareholders, would be the first between an existing Indian carrier and a foreign airline since the government eased restrictions on foreign investment in September last year.

National Mobile Telecommunications Co of Kuwait (Wataniya) reported Wednesday a 31.1 percent slide in net profit in the first quarter of 2013 due to competition and tough economic conditions.

Wataniya, in which Qatar's Qtel owns 92.1 percent, posted 19.5 million dinars ($68.7 million) in the first three months of 2013 compared to 28.3 million dinars ($99.6 million) a year ago, the company said in a statement.

Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse on Wednesday said its first quarter profit rose sharply to 1.303 billion Swiss francs (1.1 billion euros, $1.38 billion) from 44 million francs a year ago.

The significant jump in net profit is largely because the bank was weighed down by an accounting loss on its own debt during the same period last year.

A consortium of Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and France's Areva are on track to win a deal to build a $20 billion nuclear power station in Turkey, a report said on Wednesday.

The top-selling Yomiuri Shimbun said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo would likely sign the deal with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a visit to Turkey next week as part of a four-nation trip that ends on May 4.

Iran's Finance Minister Shamseddin Hosseini said Tuesday that international sanctions had pushed inflation above 30% and was causing "a lot of trouble" but that Iran's nuclear drive would not be halted.

Lashing out at measures by the United Nations, United States and European Union, Hosseini said the Iranian economy was increasingly gearing up to produce at home the goods that it cannot import.

Iraq's overall oil exports, which account for the lion's share of government income, were up in March but average daily exports fell, oil ministry spokesman Assem Jihad said on Tuesday.

Iraq exported 74.9 million barrels of oil in March, an average of about 2.4 million barrels per day, compared to 71 million barrels in February, or about 2.54 million bpd, Jihad said.

Spain's struggling economy logged a 0.5 percent contraction in the first quarter of 2013 due to falling internal demand, the central bank said on Tuesday.

"During the first quarter of 2013, the Spanish economy continued its path of contraction, but at a slower pace compared to the end of last year," the Bank of Spain said in its monthly economic bulletin for April.

Sixteen Asia-Pacific countries are set to start talks next month on a free trade zone that would cover over half the world's population, according to a document obtained by Agence France Presse Tuesday.

The start of negotiations for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are planned despite deep rifts among potential members, including China, Japan and Southeast Asian nations, over rival territorial claims.