BHP Billiton in talks with its top two candidates for the chairmanship role July 19, 2009 BHP Billiton, the mining giant, is believed to be holding interviews this week with Jacques Nasser, former chief executive of Ford, and John Schubert, a former managing director of Esso Australia, for the post of chairman. The current BHP chairman Don Argus is expected to be stepping down after the £71bn iron ore joint venture [...]
Surge in fraud as hard times encourage investors and firms to drop their guard July 19, 2009 FRAUD is hitting record levels in the UK, with over 160 cases of serious fraud with charges of more than £100,000 during the first half of this year, according to the latest barometer from business advisers KPMG. The half-year figures are the highest recorded since KPMG began the survey 21 years ago. Together the cases [...]
London lures businesses despite high tax regime July 19, 2009 WITH the news that major global corporations such as McDonald’s are planning to move their European headquarters from London to Geneva, readers may wonder how worried we should be about losing critical business mass to other European cities. Business tax is indeed one of the battlegrounds of international competitiveness. Even before the 2008 crisis we [...]
UK dominates deal rankings July 19, 2009 LONDON dominated the global mergers & acquisitions (M&A) scene last week, with deals by buyout vehicle Resolution and gas giant Centrica pushing up UK volumes by 39 per cent compared to last year. Resolution’s talk of a $2.7bn (£1.65bn) buyout of insurer Friends Provident was the top announced deal and Centrica’s $1.7bn plans to take [...]
BILL OF THE WEEK July 19, 2009 Vivat Bacchus London Bridge played host to an accountancy firm holding an out-of-office departmental meeting and celebration on Friday evening, and took the opportunity to pre-launch its upcoming Saturday jazz nights, which officially start this week. The 16 accountants were certainly in the mood for a celebration, quaffing on a jeroboam and two magnums of [...]
PWC BOYS SWAP THEIR DESKS FOR A DASHBOARD AND HIT THE STANS July 19, 2009 AS YOU reluctantly get your engine running on this Monday morning, spare a though for Tom Henry and Simon Todd of Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ London Assurance team who are in the early stages of a long and gruelling 10,000km drive from London to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Because yesterday the PwC team swapped their desks for the dashboard [...]
Myners to turn back on City over moral concerns July 19, 2009 CITY minister Lord Myners is so disgusted by arrogance and greed in the financial services sector that he will become a theology student rather than return to the City full-time. The minister, who was brought into Gordon Brown’s government as part of a series of “national service” recruitments from the private sector, said there was [...]
Huge change in the City’s roll of power July 19, 2009 A YEAR of financial turmoil has wiped all but a quarter of last year’s 100 most influential people in European financial markets off the current roll of power. This year’s Financial News FN100 listing, which has the highest rate of turnover in its five-year history, reflects the huge overhaul of top talent the credit crunch [...]
One in five jobs cut at Hit firm July 19, 2009 HIT Entertainment, the group that owns the rights to Thomas the Tank Engine and other children cartoon characters, has cut one in five jobs in an attempt to avoid breaching its banking covenants this September. Private equity firm Apax bought the children’s entertainment producer and rights owner in 2005 for around £489m. But the group [...]
Bank of Ireland eyes rights issue July 19, 2009 BANK of Ireland is understood to be planning a rights issue in November to buy out some of the government’s indirect 25 per cent stake in the lender. The move could raise the €1.5bn (£1.3bn) necessary to limit the Irish government’s preference shares at 15 per cent, minimising the possibility of majority stake ownership after [...]
