ALS plot share offer to target illiquid market October 10, 2012 LONDON listed investment firm Alternative Liquidity Solutions yesterday laid plans to raise new funds to help restructure its business. The firm, which won approval from the Financial Services Authority yesterday for a prospectus detailing the placing of up to 250 million shares, is hoping to raise upwards of £35m. It will price the shares prior [...]
RBS sells on offices to Axa and Norway in real estate unwind October 10, 2012 ROYAL Bank of Scotland has sold two office blocks in Germany to Axa’s real estate investment arm and the Norway’s state pension fund for €784m (£631m) in a further push to unwind its asset base. The two buildings, in Frankfurt and Berlin, are thought to be part of RBS’s German Pegasus portfolio, which it took [...]
Argentine warship seized by hedge fund in debt dispute October 10, 2012 HEDGE fund NML Capital, a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliott Management, will today discover if an Argentine warship it had seized in Ghana over unpaid sovereign debts will be freed. The company had the ship, the ARA Libertad, seized in the Ghanaian port of Tema on 2 October in a bid to enforce legal judgments [...]
JZ Capital buys in Spain on EU solution hopes October 10, 2012 JZ CAPITAL Partners, the listed private equity firm, yesterday said it was banking on an upswing in the European economy after increasing its investment in Spanish companies over the past six months. The fund, which invests in micro cap companies in the US, Europe and Latin America, said it put $130.8m (£81.7m) to work across [...]
HgCapital Trust net asset value trails October 10, 2012 HgCapital Trust yesterday said its net asset value return had failed to keep pace with the FTSE All-Share index in its interim management statement to the market. It said its diluted NAV return was 2.6 per cent versus a FTSE All-Share Index level of 4.7 per cent between the end of June and the end [...]
Rio Tinto to sell Alps plant October 10, 2012 Mining group Rio Tinto is pushing ahead with plans to sell a century-old aluminium plant in French Alps as the it continues its retreat from a struggling aluminium sector. The group’s Rio Tinto Alcan division that operates the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne plant said the upcoming renewal of a 30-year-old electricity supply contract with EDF swung the balance [...]
Spitalfields revival approved October 10, 2012 London Mayor Boris Johnson yesterday gave the go-ahead for the redevelopment of the London Fruit and Wool Exchange in the East End. The historic building in Spitalfields will be partly demolished to make way for a new six storey building containing shops and offices The plans, which were previously turned down by Tower Hamlets Council [...]
Pensions group warns new plan over high fees October 10, 2012 THE GOVERNMENT must stop its new auto-enrolment pension scheme from directing contributions into default funds with high charges, the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School demanded today. Firms began auto-enrolling employees at the start of this month, under the scheme spearheaded by pensions minister Steve Webb – but over 90 per cent of these will [...]
Buy-to-let yields expand due to third quarter house price dip October 10, 2012 BUY-TO-LET yields grew healthily in the third quarter, data from Mortgages for Business revealed yesterday, driven up by falling property prices. Yields on so-called “vanilla” buy-to-let – buying houses and flats to rent them to others – grew from 6.1 per cent in the second quarter to 6.7 per cent in the third, the data [...]
August boost to wholesaling a boon to US recovery ambitions October 10, 2012 SALES of wholesale goods climbed in August, data from the US Census Bureau revealed yesterday, driven by increasing inventories. Overall sales were $450.4bn (£281.4bn), up 0.9 per cent on July’s figure, and up 2.1 per cent on August 2011. However this came mainly from building up inventories, which rose 0.5 per cent on the month, putting them some [...]
