Holidaybreak bookings drop August 18, 2011 BOOKINGS for Holidaybreak’s range of school trips, adventure tours, camping and hotel breaks fell in the five months to August. Superbreak, The Luxury Hotel Collection and Holidaybreak’s other hotels businesses are seeing sales trail ten per cent below the same time last year. The company, which is being taken over by Cox & King for [...]
ANALYST VIEWS: IS CINEWORLD COPING WELL IN THE TOUGH MARKET? August 18, 2011 GEETANJALI SHARMA | ESPIRITO SANTO This is a very encouraging set of results from Cineworld. It is encouraging to note that despite Avatar and Alice in Wonderland being in the first half 2010 comparatives and Harry Potter not included in first half 2011, Cineworld’s admissions are up 2.2 per cent year on year. NIGEL PARSON [...]
Tracinda offloads MGM shares August 18, 2011 Billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian’s Tracinda Corp has sold 20m shares in gambling and resort operator MGM Resorts International, leaving it with a 22.8 per cent interest. Tracinda disclosed in a filing yesterday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it still held 111,173,744 shares after the sale. In April, Tracinda, which is based in [...]
TJ Hughes creditors lose £400m August 18, 2011 Discount chain TJ Hughes collapsed with total debts of £433.5m, administrators at Ernst & Young have said, and most creditors have little hope of recovering much of their money. The group, which collapsed in June despite investment from turnaround specialist Endless LLP, heard from 156 interested parties over a takeover or sale of the business, [...]
Science still below par as passes rise August 18, 2011 BUSINESS leaders yesterday said the number of students studying A-Level maths and science is still too low, despite an upswing in the number of candidates taking A-Levels in these subjects since 2010. The number of UK students sitting A-Level maths rose 7.8 per cent since last year, according to yesterday’s provisional data released by the [...]
Miners eye Colombia growth August 18, 2011 ANGLO American, Xstrata and BHP Billiton have approved a $1.3bn (£789m) expansion of the Cerrejon mine, home to one of the world’s largest coal deposits, in Colombia. The diversified miners said yesterday they would invest equal amounts in the project that will increase production and export capacity by 8m tonnes per annum (mtpa) to 40 [...]
Tax programme lures high achiever August 18, 2011 PEOPLE always assumed Jasmine Cope, a high achiever who skipped a year at the Sir Henry Floyd Grammar School in Aylesbury, would go on to university. But Cope, who turns 17 tomorrow, turned her back on higher education after the tuition fees increase left her “unable to justify” finishing her studies with so much debt, [...]
The UK is lagging behind despite growth in maths August 18, 2011 DESPITE the jump in students taking mathematics at A-Level, the UK risks falling further behind other nations unless the qualification becomes more popular, an education charity claims. “[A]s recent reports have highlighted, the UK still lags well behind its industrial competitors in terms of participation in mathematics education beyond GCSE level,” said Mathematics in Education [...]
Noble Energy inks $3.4bn deal to develop shale gas August 18, 2011 OIL and gas producer Noble Energy will pay $3.4bn (£2.06bn) to Consol Energy to form a partnership to develop Consol’s assets in the Marcellus shale. The move is S&P 500-listed Noble’s first into the Marcellus shale deposit in the eastern US, one of the largest natural gas fields ever discovered, and comes amid a natural [...]
CITY VIEWS: DO YOU THINK EXAMS ARE GETTING EASIER OR STANDARDS ARE GETTING HIGHER? August 18, 2011 MICHAEL WATTS | BERENBERG BANK “I do think that students are working harder. But I think that results are being driven by the government trying to ensure pass rates get higher year on year, which makes me quite cynical of the statistics we are seeing.” PAUL MILLER | TARDIS GROUP “I don’t think the increase [...]
