Daejan blames Southern Cross for its losses November 30, 2011 PROPERTY group Daejan Holdings yesterday blamed its swing to a half-year loss on the failure of care home manager Southern Cross. FTSE 250-listed Daejan posted a pre-tax loss of £121,000 for the six months to the end of September, compared with a profit of £39.3m a year ago. The firm said lost rent and expenses [...]
CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS November 30, 2011 Thomas Eggar The law firm has announced the appointment of James Letchford to its London property team as a senior associate. Letchford trained and qualified at Ashurst before spending six years at Nabarro, and will join Thomas Eggar’s London team, led by property partner Chris Baker. He has particular experience in sales, acquisitions, development, leasing [...]
BEST OF THE BROKERS November 30, 2011 AMLIN After management gave a confident presentation to Nomura earlier this week, the broker rates the insurance group as a “buy” with a target price of 359p. Nomura says that the impact from catastrophes in 2011 has been a surprise, but future volatility can be limited by managing risk exposure. It also says comments on [...]
Liquidity measures and new Chinese rules lift the FTSE November 30, 2011 BRITAIN’S top share index rose by the most in nearly eight weeks yesterday after central banks announced coordinated global action to provide liquidity to the financial system and China cut its banks’ reserve requirement ratios. The world’s major central banks acted jointly to provide cheaper dollar liquidity to starved European banks facing a credit crunch [...]
US stocks surge on dollar scheme November 30, 2011 US stocks surged yesterday after major central banks agreed to make cheaper dollar loans for struggling European banks to prevent the Eurozone debt woes from turning into a full-blown credit crisis. The S&P 500 posted its best daily percentage gain since August after the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and other major central banks [...]
Don’t stay to the end of every meeting, listen to gossip and make slow choices November 30, 2011 During a 24-year career at McKinsey, John Brady advised chief executives of consumer giants. Here he shares his top ten insights 1. WASTE TIME GOSSIPING Believe in the power of gossip. Most of the really interesting insights I gained as a management consultant happened either when I was chatting in clients’ office doorways at the [...]
Rebuilding UK infrastructure as an engine for growth is a task for private companies November 30, 2011 IN TUESDAY’S Autumn Statement, the chancellor committed an additional £25bn in public spending on infrastructure over the next three years. The importance of this promise isn’t in the Keynesian speed of the payback in employment (in fact modern road and rail infrastructure has long lead-in times), but in the significant benefits of great infrastructure in [...]
Red tape around audit is proving hard to untangle November 30, 2011 THE Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has published proposals to reduce financial reporting requirements for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) and subsidiaries. EU rules mean that to classify as small for accounting purposes, a company must comply with two out of three criteria: gross assets of no more than £3.26m; turnover of no [...]
The unions are holding back better pay deals November 30, 2011 IT MIGHT have been the worst general strike for a generation, but it clearly failed to take off. Apart from the closure of my children’s school, and the vast army of police protecting parliament, I honestly didn’t notice much impact from it. As the Prime Minister said, in the end it felt a bit of [...]
RAPID RESPONSES November 30, 2011 Called out on pay Allister Heath suggests several reforms for pay in his recent editor’s letter [Rights and wrongs of boardroom pay, last Wednesday]. Among them, he argues that in his proposed system “pay would be linked very closely to a shareholder value and would go down as well as up.” However, he fails to [...]
