Sports Direct owner comes out fighting July 11, 2008 Mike Ashley, the boisterous billionaire owner of Sports Direct, yesterday pledged to become a “good guy on corporate governance” as the retailer saw its full-year profits halve as consumers tightened their spending. The retailer’s lack of transparency in failing to provide like-for-like sales in its quarterly results has been heavily criticised by City analysts. But [...]
Rose survives protest vote on double role July 10, 2008 Marks & Spencer boss Sir Stuart Rose has kept his job after a planned shareholder revolt at the retailer’s annual meeting yesterday turned into no more than a whimper. Over 94 per cent of the grey-haired army that braved the rain to descend on the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank yesterday afternoon to [...]
Financial jobs boom to fade July 8, 2008 City recruiter Michael Page saw its first-half global profits rise 31 per cent but warned the slowdown in UK recruitment looks set to continue. The global firm posted group half year profits of £135.5m, up from £90.4m last year. Its UK division, which contributes a third of the group’s gross profits, delivered a 3.9 per [...]
Persimmon in mass job cull July 7, 2008 Persimmon, Britain’s most profitable housebuilder, will announce tomorrow that it is cutting 20 per cent of its workforce, in the latest mass cull to hit the beleaguered sector. Persimmon is expected to say it is making at least 1,000 redundancies in a trading update on Tuesday, as it attempts to reduce costs and ride out [...]
Berkeley pays bosses £60m July 7, 2008 Multi-Millionaire property entrepreneur Tony Pidgley and three of his fellow directors at housebuilder Berkeley Group are getting a £60m pay-out, it has emerged. Pidgley and the three other members of the management team will net around 7 per cent of the company, which is valued at around £770m. The pay-outs come at a time when [...]
Stuart Rose faces huge protest vote July 7, 2008 Up to 30 per cent of Marks & Spencer shareholders angry at Rose’s power grab Marks & Spencer is bracing itself for up to a third of its investors to abstain or vote against Sir Stuart Rose’s controversial plans to hold both chairman and chief executive positions at the retailer’s annual general meeting on Wednesday. [...]
Cash in on volatile financial markets July 4, 2008 More tips on how to succeed in financial betting At the core of speculation on the financial markets is a single premise – your opinion that the market will ‘do something’. The simple, fixed risk nature of fixed odds financial betting is such that you can never lose more than your stake, but has the [...]
Apprentice boss Sugar to quit Amstrad July 3, 2008 Sir Alan Sugar, the entrepreneur and star of the BBC reality TV show The Apprentice, has stepped down as chairman of Amstrad, the electronics firm he founded at the tender age of 21. Though Sir Alan, now 61, said the move had been “planned for a while”, the self-made multi-millionaire is adamant he is not [...]
FSA clamps down on CFD investors July 3, 2008 Rules forcing contract for difference (CFD) holders to disclose long positions of three per cent have had a mixed reaction in the City. A clampdown by City watchdog the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has long been anticipated due to fears that investors are using CFDs, which give exposure to a share for a fraction of [...]
Using CFDs to jazz up a DIY pension July 1, 2008 New rules on Sipps mean that there are even more ways to plan for the future, says Katie Hope Last week, the government announced that as of October, the estimated 10 million people holding money in protected rights pension pots will be able to transfer it into a Self Invested Personal Pension, otherwise known as [...]
