As French football star Zinedine Zidane, or Zizou, came to Bangladesh in 2006, he had no clue the visit would inspire an entire film. But that's exactly what happened. Taraporevala wrote a script around it and the result is Little Zizou.

"The film's about a 11-year-old football-crazy boy called Zerxes, who refers to himself as little Zizou and Zidane as big Zizou. When Zidane visits Bangladesh, Zerxes prays to his deceased mother to bring the football star to the country," says Taraporevala, and quickly clarifies the film is not really about football as such.

London, Feb 27 : American musical group MGMT are suing French President Nicolas Sarkozy for using one of their hit songs without permission as a campaign soundtrack.

MGMT, formerly known as The Management, claim that Sarkozy''s UMP party used the track `Kids' at its national congress and in two online videos.

The political party admitted to using it by saying that it was a mistake, and they tried to rectify the matter by offering a symbolic gesture of one euro.

Paris - An appeals court in the French city of Bordeaux has frozen some 4.2 million euros (5.37 million dollars) in two French bank accounts belonging to the president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, the daily Sud Ouest reported on Thursday.

The court wants to force Bongo to pay 1.131 million euros to a French businessman, Rene Cardona, stemming from an incident in 1996.

At the time, Cardona's son had to pay the equivalent of 457,347 euros to Bongo to free his father from a jail cell in the Gabonese capital Libreville.

Paris - Badly stung by the financial crisis, the French mutual banking group Banque Populaire said Thursday it had lost 468 million euros (598 million dollars) in 2008, its first loss in decades.

Turnover for Banque Populaire was down 17.8 per cent over 2007, to 1.1 billion euros, the bank said in a press statement.

Paris/Brussels - French-Belgian bank Dexia said Thursday that it had lost 3.326 billion euros (4.25 billion dollars) in 2008 primarily because of losses related to the US subprime crisis.

Turnover fell by nearly half compared with 2007, to 3.556 billion euros, with the financial crisis eating nearly 6 billion euros out of the bank's earnings, Dexia said in a statement.

Dexia suffered more than half of that negative impact in the fourth quarter of last year, when it posted a loss of 2.6 billion euros.

Basel - Sarasin and Cie, a private Swiss bank, said Thursday its adjusted net profits in 2008 were 114.4 million Swiss francs (98.2 million dollars), down from 173.5 million the previous year.

The bank said it had an "impressive" new money inflow of 14.5 billion francs in 2008, a 30 per cent increase over 2007. Just over half of the new money came in during the later part of the year.

At the end of 2008, Sarasin managed client assets totalling 69.7 billion, a drop of 16 per cent compared to the previous year, attributed to overall market conditions.