Workers occupy Arcelor plant February 20, 2012 Workers at an idled ArcelorMittal steel plant in north east France occupied the site yesterday, seeking to put their plight on the political map ahead of a presidential election where industrial decline is a central theme. Some 200 workers invaded management offices at the factory in Florange, in the Moselle region close to Belgium and [...]
Alibaba Group takes $3bn loan February 20, 2012 Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba Group was yesterday set to sign a $3bn (£1.9bn) loan it plans to use to take private its Hong Kong-listed unit, Alibaba.com. Alibaba Group, which is 40 per cent-owned by Yahoo, is looking to take Alibaba.com private in a bid to strengthen founder Jack Ma’s control of his e-commerce empire.
CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS February 20, 2012 Royal Bank of Scotland RBS has appointed Stuart Dean as head of healthcare in the corporate and institutional banking (CIB) team. Dean has worked at RBS for more than 11 years in the bank’s structured finance division in the south of England and London. Before joining RBS, he spent two years at the John Lewis [...]
BEST OF THE BROKERS February 20, 2012 LADBROKES UBS rates the betting group “buy” and has lifted its target price by 5p to 175p. The firm’s full year results were above forecasts, with strong growth in UK retail, which the broker says will continue this year thanks to double-digit growth at betting machines and a boost from Euro 2012. UBS expects to [...]
European markets rise on Greek talks February 20, 2012 EUROPEAN shares closed at a near seven-month high yesterday as Eurozone finance ministers edged closer to a long-awaited agreement on a rescue package for Greece. The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index of top shares rose 0.7 per cent to 1,090.95 points. Volume was low, at 69.5 per cent of the 90-day average, with Wall Street closed [...]
China’s monetary easing puts FTSE close to the 6,000 level February 20, 2012 A SURPRISE easing in China’s monetary policy drove Britain’s FTSE 100 within striking distance of a seven and a half month closing high as miners rallied on the prospect of revived demand from the world’s most voracious consumer of raw materials. Miners were the top gainers as London’s blue chip index climbed 40.18 points, or [...]
Is the NHS reform bill a cure for Britain’s healthcare ills? February 20, 2012 YES DAVID SKELTON ANY changes to the NHS are always going to provoke controversy. But in a healthcare landscape characterised by changing health needs, rapid technological innovation and rising patient expectations, reform is vital if the NHS is to meet the challenges of the coming decades. That is one of the reasons that these proposals [...]
Keeping zombie companies alive is a scary policy February 20, 2012 COMPANY insolvencies are a sign of a healthy economy and preventing companies from failing stifles the innovation this country needs to grow. Insolvencies, together with mergers and acquisitions, new company registrations, recruitment, and redundancies are, strange though it may seem to some, a sign of a healthy economy. Analysis of the number of new companies [...]
A new way to explain how much they spend February 20, 2012 SOME readers may be familiar with recent attempts to make US government spending plans easier to grasp by converting them to a representative family budget. Having recently returned from a weekend teaching in Croatia, I want to use it as a European example, hopefully shorn of the partisan emotions that can arise when discussing the [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 20, 2012 Water pipedream [Re: Time to invest in infrastructure we actually need, yesterday] In 2006, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) studied the potential to transfer water using the established river network. At the time this was mistaken in media reports as recommending a national water grid but that was not what ICE proposed. ICE concluded, [...]
