Institute of Directors presses for chair of Barclays’ pay board Sir John Sunderland to go March 9, 2015 Investors and business groups attacked Barclays’ long-serving director Sir John Sunderland yesterday, accusing the bank of failing to honour a pledge to replace him as chairman of the remuneration committee. Last April, Barclays said that Sunderland would leave the bank “at a date to be agreed”, and would be replaced by Crawford Gillies. But 11 [...]
Auto Trader IPO could value company at £2.5bn March 9, 2015 Used-car website Auto Trader could be valued at up to £2.5bn when the company floats on the London Stock Exchange this month. The company announced plans to float at the end of last month with a valuation expected to reach just £2bn. Auto Trader, which operates Britain’s leading website for buying and selling new and used [...]
CRH share price dives as doubts of Holcim-Lafarge merger hit Irish firm March 9, 2015 Shares in Irish building supplies company CRH plummeted yesterday amid reports that a merger between Swiss cement maker Holcim and its French counterpart Lafarge could fall apart. The fears arose after Holcim’s largest stakeholder, Thomas Schmidheiny, who owns about 20 per cent of the company, demanded a better deal, according to Swiss weekly SonntagsZeitung. [...]
Bijoux – that is, tiny – flat in Mayfair rented in record time March 9, 2015 YOU COULD probably just about swing a cat in a one-bedroom Mayfair flat that was yesterday let at record speed. Boasting just 301 sq ft, the “bijoux” flat in Pollen Street, between Hanover Square and Regent Street, took just 40 minutes to let for up £1,560 per month. The new tenant, an “executive in the hospitality [...]
Treasury sells off another £500m of bailed out Lloyds Bank stake March 9, 2015 LLOYDS shares fell yesterday as the government revealed it had sold off another £500m stake in the bank. The government is drip-feeding shares on to the market in a bid to steadily recoup the cost of the bailout. It has now raised more than £1bn since launching the sale policy in December 2014. The latest [...]
Lord Adair Turner finds something useful to do March 9, 2015 The man who described some banking as socially useless gets a new job – with a bank. It is not unfair to say that Lord Adair Turner has not always been a friend to banks. Turner was a non-executive director at Standard Chartered in the boom years before the crash, and an executive at Merrill [...]
General Motors’ activist investor succeeds in share buyback battle March 9, 2015 GENERAL Motors (GM) announced a $5bn (£3.3bn) a share buyback yesterday, ending a two-month standoff with activist investor Harry J. Wilson. The Detroit car giant came close to collapse in 2009 as the financial crisis took hold, and was forced to file for bankruptcy, relying on a $51bn US government bailout. But the company has [...]
Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket: New Tory poster warns of Labour reliance on SNP March 9, 2015 The Conservatives ramped up their attack on Labour yesterday, with a new poster that said Labour would be dictated to by the Scottish National Party (SNIP) in a hung parliament. The poster featured Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket, and was placed on the iconic Piccadilly Circus advertising billboards. The advert comes just days [...]
Battersea Power Station office development details revealed March 9, 2015 BATTERSEA Power Station’s Boiler House will be transformed into 450,000 square feet of offices set around a 26-metre-high atrium for businesses to “create networks and broker deals”, according to new details revealed yesterday. The building’s owners, which have launched the office phase of the development, unveiled the first images of the interiors, which are being [...]
MPs want pensions watchdog to protect retirees from themselves March 9, 2015 Pensioners need a tough new regulator to protect them from making bad decisions with their savings, an influential group of MPs said today. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is not sufficiently focused on pensions, and so a new single regulator is needed, MPs on the Work and Pensions Select Committee said. They called for the next government [...]
