Payday for boss as Double Helix is sold for £50m June 26, 2012 BRITISH healthcare consultancy Double Helix has been sold to an American advertising group for up to £50m, it was announced yesterday, leading to a windfall for founder Wayne Phillips. Phillips, the doctor and pharmaceutical exec who set up Double Helix in 1995, will remain in charge when Interpublic Group takes over the firm. Although the [...]
BP to sell two stakes in North Sea for £179m June 26, 2012 BP said yesterday it had agreed to sell its minority stakes in two North Sea fields to Japanese trading company Mitsui for $280m (£179m), as part of a plan to focus its portfolio in the region on larger scale projects. The oil major announced that Mitsui would buy a 13.3 per cent stake in the [...]
ADVISERS JEFFERIES June 26, 2012 NEIL SCHROEDER MD OIL AND GAS INVESTMENT BANKING Investment bank Jefferies is advising BP on its deal with Mitsui. The team was led by Neil Schroeder, who has headed up the company’s oil and gas team since 2005. He is also advising Sojitz and Bridge Energy on UK North Sea divestments, and recently advised Endeavour [...]
Sean Quinn faces jail June 26, 2012 ONCE Ireland’s richest man, Sean Quinn was found guilty of contempt yesterday and may go to jail after a court ruled that the bankrupt businessman had blocked a state bank from seizing property worth hundreds of millions of euros. Quinn, whose €4bn (£3.2bn) business empire collapsed after a disastrous investment in now-nationalised Anglo Irish Bank, [...]
Coke to invest $3bn in India June 26, 2012 COCA-COLA announced a further $3bn (£1.92bn) in investment in India over the next eight years yesterday as the world’s biggest soft drinks maker seeks to expand in a country where its flagship brand trails rival Pepsi. The investment by Coca-Cola and its bottlers, on top of a $2bn five-year plan announced in November, will hearten [...]
Serco warns that sluggish sales in US will lead to a revenue dip June 26, 2012 OUTSOURCER Serco yesterday gave a downbeat trading update in which it said the US market was sluggish. The company, whose contracts include running prisons and the Docklands light railway, said it expected revenues to dip in the first half before picking up. It said the UK was proving resilient compared with its business across the [...]
Petrofac sunny about profits June 26, 2012 BRITISH oil services company Petrofac said yesterday contracts worth $1.1bn (£705m) were in its pipeline and would soon be signed, giving it confidence on its profit targets for this year and in the longer term. Petrofac, which designs and builds oil and gas infrastructure and also invests with producers in oil fields, said that its [...]
Coryton site sold to Shell June 26, 2012 CORYTON refinery, which was formerly run by now insolvent Petroplus, will be turned into a fuel import terminal after administrator PwC agreed to sell the site to the joint venture of Vopak, Shell and Greenergy. PwC said the new owners will now start “significant reconfiguration of the existing site” in Essex. Energy minister Chris Hendry [...]
Falklands partners with French June 26, 2012 Falkland Oil & Gas yesterday brought in Italian utility Edison as its new partner, bringing in a large, non-British company to help it look for oil in the UK-governed Falkland Islands, where exploration has angered Argentina. The British company said Edison, owned by France’s EDF, would pay around $50m for costs already encountered in exploration [...]
Adecco plans share buyback June 26, 2012 Adecco will buy back up to €400m (£319.5m) of shares from mid-July, the world’s largest staffing company said yesterday. Adecco, which has a market capitalisation of about £4.6bn, said it would fund the share buyback in the debt capital market and was planning to issue bonds in the near future, subject to market conditions. The [...]
