G4S wins £100m contract to provide security for Olympicsa March 21, 2011 SECURITY services firm G4S said it had signed a contract, estimated to be worth £100m, to be the official security services provider for the London 2012 Olympic Games. G4S, which provides services ranging from cash transportation and facilities management to security and protection, said it will recruit, train and manage the 10,000 guards needed for [...]
Google gets record privacy fine in France and email trouble in China March 21, 2011 SEARCH engine Google weathered two international spats yesterday, as France fined the online giant for breaching privacy rules and the firm blamed the Chinese government for interfering with its email service. France’s online privacy watchdog CNIL slapped Google with a €100,000 (£87,146) fine, CNIL’s biggest to date, for collecting data unfairly through its Street View [...]
TWO HALVES March 21, 2011 PUNCH, the highly-indebted pubs group headed up by Ian Dyson, is today expected to announce the demerger of its Spirit unit when it unveils a long-awaited strategic review. The Spirit Group – which is made up of better-performing managed pubs – would be spun off, leaving Punch to sell off underperforming pubs in its leased [...]
Regus shares jump on rosy 2011 outlook March 21, 2011 WORKSPACE rental company Regus reported a 67 per cent drop in earnings after it saw little benefit from any economic upturn, but its shares jumped after it hiked its dividend and said expansion and cost-cutting will return it to growth in 2011. The group, which offers ready-to-use offices for rentals as short as half a [...]
CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS March 21, 2011 Alvarez & Marsal The independent professional services firm has expanded its European private equity advisory business with the appointment of David Sage (pictured) as a managing director. Sage brings over 20 years’ experience in restructuring and financial advisory, having worked at Ernst & Young, where he completed assignments for Apax, Blackstone, CVC, Goldman Sachs and [...]
Queue forms for Choo bid March 21, 2011 CLOSE to a dozen private equity firms have approached brokerage Daniel Stewart over a potential partnership with Jimmy Choo to spent £500m buying back part of the company Choo founded, City A.M. has learned. Daniel Stewart is advising Choo on the bid to buy his company back from private equity firm, Towerbrook Capital, which has [...]
BNP Paribas chief gets €1.67 bonus March 21, 2011 BNP Paribas, France’s biggest listed bank, awarded chief executive Baudouin Prot a €1.67m (£1.5m) bonus for 2010. Prot, one of the few bank chiefs to have kept his position throughout the crisis, will receive 60 per cent of the bonus, or €1m, as a deferred payment over 2012, 2013 and 2014, BNP said on its [...]
Hapag-Lloyd owner delays IPO March 21, 2011 Owners of Hapag-Lloyd have postponed a decision on floating the container shipping group, its majority owner said yesterday. “There will be no decision on an IPO (initial public offering) today,” a spokesman for the Albert Ballin consortium, which owns 50.2 per cent of Hapag-Lloyd, said citing an uncertain capital market environment. The supervisory board of [...]
BEST OF THE BROKERS March 21, 2011 COMPUTACENTER JP Morgan Cazenove rates the IT infrastructure provider “overweight” and has raised its target price from 345p to 480p following results last week. The broker has raised its revenue forecast by 13 per cent for 2011 to £2.97bn for the year, giving a pre-tax profit of £77m. It expects a steady growth trajectory for [...]
The man who wants to get the SFO ready for business March 21, 2011 The country’s top fraudbuster Richard Alderman may be retiring next year but after arresting Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz he has very publicly taken on the fight of his life. Earlier this month, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), of which the 58-year-old Alderman is the director, briefly arrested and questioned the billionaire brothers along with seven [...]
