Land Rover wins debt lifeline August 9, 2009 Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has secured a £75m finance lifeline by mortgaging its stock of Land Rover parts.Burdale Financial, Bank of Ireland’s finance division, has granted a three-year debt facility of up to £75m to the carmaker, which is owned by Tata Motors, of India.The loan is secured on the inventory of Land Rover’s parts [...]
MANDELSON: GET A MOVE ON, TATA July 19, 2009 BUSINESS secretary Lord Mandelson has said Tata Motors has yet to respond to a government offer of aid for its stricken UK-based automaker Jaguar Land Rover. “I am simply saying that if this situation is so urgent, I think that Tata need to quicken the pace of their response,” he said.
RIVERS OF BUBBLY AND HALF A COW: CITY BOYS TAKE MACHO CHALLENGE September 20, 2009 EMERGING pleasantly sated from an overdose of fine wining and dining this past weekend, The Capitalist was intrigued to see two City institutions taking a stand on how to deal with the effect of the recession on the Square Mile lunch market. A little bird at Gaucho – catering for the red-blooded males and less-than-faint-hearted [...]
60,000 drivers take up scrappage offer June 15, 2009 MORE than 60,000 orders for new cars have been made under the government’s scrappage scheme, in a rare piece of positive news for the struggling sector. The drive to encourage spending on motors, which began in May, offers consumers £2,000 on cars over 10 years old. Half of the incentive money is supplied by the [...]
Porsche: China will usurp Germany in three years June 15, 2009 CARMAKER Porsche said yesterday that emerging superpower China could usurp Germany as its second-largest market in less than three years, as wages in the country go up and demand for its sports sedan rockets. “All premier manufacturers in China are showing good results,” Porsche’s China boss Helmut Broeker said. The carmaker is planning to add [...]
Tata on track for refinancing May 21, 2009 Tata Motors, which owns British marques through its Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) unit, moved closer to fully refinancing the $3bn (£1.8bn) bridge loan it used to buy JLR, after it raised 426bn rupees (£26.4m) through a rupee bond yeterday. Together with earlier prepayments of $1.11bn, the bond means India’s largest automaker now has $1.05bn outstanding [...]
Automatic for the people? June 30, 2009 THE best high-performance cars come with a manual gearbox, right? Well, not according to Mercedes-Benz. On the evidence of this car, their stance appears to be that machines can change gear more efficiently than humans. But where’s the fun in that? Having driven this car in automatic form, I was yearning to feel how it [...]
White bags and Burmese rubies: a practical guide to stealth wealth May 18, 2009 THERE was a time, not that long ago, that guests at Nobu would be eager to show that they were raking it in. Expensive bottles of sake would be ordered and placed on the table for all to see. But in these straitened times even the wealthy are less inclined to be seen to spend [...]
Daredevil for a day June 8, 2009 ANYONE who has marvelled at the aerial spectacle of the Red Bull Air Race must surely have wondered what it is like to hurtle along in a small aircraft at high speed just feet above the ground. The airborne equivalent of Formula One, the event has attracted millions of spectators around the world. But while [...]