John Lewis to give staff £151m bonus March 11, 2010 JOHN Lewis will hand its staff a 15 per cent bonus after reporting a surge in annual profits. The retailer made a profit before the staff bonus and tax of £306.6m in the year to the end of January – up from £279.6m in the previous year. It owns 28 department stores, one John Lewis [...]
JD Wetherspoon restores dividend after record profit March 11, 2010 PUB chain Wetherspoon today announced the end of a year-long dividend freeze after successfully completing its debt refinancing. Shareholders will receive a 12p dividend on 1 April for the year to July 2009 with a further special dividend of 7p a share. Last year it scrapped its dividend payment as negotiated its refinancing. It has [...]
Home Retail Group ups forecasts but Argos slumps March 11, 2010 HOME retail Group – which owns Argos and Homebase – has tipped its pre-tax profit for the year to come in at £290m The figure is slightly ahead of market forecasts for the year to 27 February. Argos sales fell 9.4 per cent while sales at its home improvement operation Homebase declined 0.6 per cent [...]
Morrisons raises dividend after profits surge March 11, 2010 SUPERMARKET chain Morrisons saw a 21 per cent surge in profits last year to £767m. The company, Britain’s fourth largest grocer, raised its full year dividend 41 per cent to 8.2 pence a share on the strength of the results. Morrisons new chief executive Dalton Philips starts later this month. Former chief executive, Marc Bolland, [...]
CITY: KEN CLARKE FOR CHANCELLOR March 10, 2010 KEN Clarke would make a better chancellor than George Osborne, according to our panel of City A.M. readers. Clarke, who held the job between 1993 and 1997 and is now shadow business secretary, topped the vote with 36 per cent and pushed Osborne – the official shadow chancellor – into second place. The City A.M./PHI [...]
Banks told to prepare for gloom March 10, 2010 UK banks have been ordered by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) to prepare for a double dip recession, another crash in house prices and a sharp increase in unemployment. The 2010 stress test targets set by the regulator are even more stringent than last year and have been heavily criticised by institutions already short of [...]
EU to look at a swaps ban March 10, 2010 THE European Union has been asked by a group of Europe’s leading economies to look into banning speculative trading in credit default swaps (CDS). France and Germany are leading the attack and want more control in tackling extreme speculation and to police the deficit spending of other member states. The move by Europe’s two leading [...]
The City is not in love with Osborne March 10, 2010 SOMETHING has gone badly wrong for the Tories. Not only is their lead in the national opinion polls looking too low to prevent a hung parliament – they are on just 37 per cent, against 32 per cent for Labour, according to YouGov’s latest poll – it is now clear that they have failed to [...]
WHAT THE OTHER PAPERS SAY THIS MORNING March 10, 2010 FINANCIAL TIMES SHINSEI IN CAPITAL DRIVE AS MERGER FALTERS Shinsei, the Japanese bank, is preparing to raise about Y75bn ($830m) in fresh capital as a merger with a rival domestic lender once seen as a lifeline is in danger of collapse. Shinsei has concluded that a merger with Aozora, the Japanese bank part-owned by Cerberus [...]
MEPs want a Tobin tax March 10, 2010 MEMBERS of the European Parliament have taken the extraordinary step of voting in favour of a Tobin tax on financial transactions. The resolution was passed by 536 to 80 votes yesterday and the European Commission will now investigate a levy. A financial transaction tax at the European level is still a long way down the [...]