Luminar leaves the dancefloor October 26, 2011 NIGHTCLUB operator Luminar said yesterday it is entering administration proceedings, just a month after telling the market that trading at its Oceana and Liquid venues had stabilised. Luminar said that Lloyds, RBS and Barclays had decided not to extend the waiver on certain covenants related to a three-year banking facility, meaning that the terms of [...]
CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS October 26, 2011 Chaucer Syndicates Mark Wood (pictured) has been appointed as chairman of Chaucer Syndicates, the specialist insurance group that underwrites risk at Lloyd’s of London. Wood, who replaces Bob Deutsch, was previously deputy chairman and chief executive of Paternoster UK, chief executive of Prudential’s UK and European insurance businesses, and UK chief executive of AXA. In [...]
FTSE 100 climbs on hopes EU summit will tackle crisis October 26, 2011 BRITAIN’S leading share index last night reached its highest closing level for two-and-half months. Defensive stocks performed well as investors awaited the outcome of a European Union summit, which opened last night, to resolve the two-year-old sovereign debt crisis. Investors also rewarded companies reporting strong figures in a patchy quarterly results season, with BG Group [...]
Peugeot to cut 6,000 jobs after profit warning October 26, 2011 French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen, beset by gloom in European showrooms, has warned its core business would make barely any money this year and announced 6,000 job losses to cut costs. Setting a bleak tone for a slew of earnings reports from European car makers this week, PSA said pricing pressure and falling demand in [...]
SERCO WINS NEW BORIS BIKE CONTRACT October 25, 2011 Support services firm Serco yesterday signed a £50m agreement to support the expansion of TfL’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme into East London. The contract will run until 2015 and include the design, operation and installation of the scheme in Tower Hamlets, plus new docking stations to serve the Westfield shopping centre in West London. Serco [...]
EU summit optimism won’t last for long October 25, 2011 FOREX conditions are choppy for euro traders, with yesterday’s moves indicative of the jittery markets. Upon the news that the Ecofin conference won’t take place, euro-dollar quickly dropped 0.6 per cent. Twitter feeds across the world were swamped with presumptions that the full emergency heads-of-government summit was also cancelled. Euro-dollar rebounded, as it became clear [...]
Barclays offloads Russian retail unit to Igor Kim October 25, 2011 Barclays has agreed to sell its Russian retail and commercial banking operations to local banker Igor Kim. Barclays said its Barclays Bank LLC Russian division had gross assets of £513m as of the end of September 2011. It added that the sale of the business would not have any material impact on its earnings or [...]
Accounting tweak hides bank wipeout October 24, 2011 ACCOUNTING technicalities have disguised the true extent of the wipeout for Wall Street’s investment banks this quarter, according to data compiled by Financial News. A run of US bank results for the third quarter of this year exceeded analysts’ expectations last week, but a closer look at the numbers shows that their investment banking businesses [...]
GENERATION Y DECLARES ITS FINANCE MANIFESTO FOR FUTURE October 24, 2011 THE FINANCIAL services industry should be “a part of society, not apart from it”, said the next generation of City leaders as they set out their plans for righting past wrongs at Whitehall. Politicians and regulators including Conservative MP Matthew Hancock and Prudential’s public affairs director Miles Celic supported TheCityUK-backed group as it launched its [...]
CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS October 24, 2011 Genzyme David Meeker has been appointed as chief executive of Genzyme, part of the wider Sanofi healthcare group, effective from 1 November. He will also join the group management committee. Meeker joined Genzyme in 1994 as medical director to work on the cystic fibrosis gene therapy programme. Rising to the position of president of the [...]