Southern Cross aims for rent deal March 27, 2011 STRUGGLING care home operator Southern Cross is preparing for “hardball negotiations” with landlords to cut its massive rental bill, a person close to the firm said yesterday. Southern Cross last week wrote to around a third of its landlords to request a switch from quarterly to monthly payments, after taking on KPMG’s Richard Fleming and [...]
WHAT THE OTHER PAPERS SAY THIS MORNING March 24, 2011 FINANCIAL TIMES BARCLAYS AT CENTRE OF LIBOR INQUIRY Barclays is emerging as a key focus of the US and UK regulatory probe into alleged rigging of benchmark interbank lending rates that are the reference point for $350,000bn in financial products, people familiar with the investigation said. Investigators are probing whether communications between the bank’s traders [...]
Retailers and mining stocks power rebound in the FTSE March 24, 2011 RETAILERS were among the top performers in a rally in Britain’s top share index yesterday that took the FTSE 100 back to levels last seen just before the earthquake in Japan. Results from Kingfisher and Next showed how some retailers can overcome tough trading conditions in the UK. Kingfisher, which hiked its dividend and reported [...]
HSBC’s Gulliver faces opposition over planned £13.3m package March 23, 2011 HSBC ’s proposal to pay its chief executive up to £13.3m this year is likely to meet shareholder opposition, investor representatives said yesterday. The bank’s compensation committee has proposed paying Stuart Gulliver a base salary of £1.25m, a bonus of up to three times that and a long-term performance-based payout six times his base salary. [...]
Glencore close to hiring eight banks for float March 22, 2011 GLENCORE, the Swiss commodity trading giant, is close to hiring eight banks to supervise its planned multi-billion-dollar London and Hong Kong listing, a person familiar with the matter said. Glencore, valued earlier this year by one analyst at about $60bn (£36.7bn), is continuing to prepare for what could be a record London initial public offering [...]
BoE rebuffs SLS payback request March 22, 2011 THE Bank of England has told Barclays and HSBC they cannot repay their remaining exposure to its Special Liquidity Scheme (SLS) early. It is understood it is worried the exit of key members from the scheme could undermine those remaining in it – most importantly state-backed Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland. Barclays [...]
FSA makes up rising costs in higher penalties March 22, 2011 A BUMPER year for enforcement fines means that financial firms will pay less for the FSA’s upkeep despite a ten per cent rise in its costs, the Authority’s business plan for 2011/2012 revealed yesterday. Fees will drop two per cent because revenues from financial penalties doubled from £33.2m in 2009/2010 to £79.1m in the year [...]
Barclays offloads toxic assets but Protium still awaits buyer March 21, 2011 BARCLAYS has managed to offload $586m (£359m) of toxic assets to an American real estate investment trust (REIT), but investors are waiting to hear about the sale of Protium, the £7.5bn’s worth of toxic assets that Barclays converted into a loan in 2009. The bank would not say what profit or loss it made on [...]
Upbeat engineers and banks drive FTSE 100 to 1.2pc gain March 21, 2011 MINERS, banks and engineers drove gains in Britain’s top share index by the close yesterday as hope grew that the nuclear crisis in Japan is easing, while heavyweight Vodafone was boosted by M&A activity. The FTSE 100 closed up 67.96 points, or 1.2 per cent, at 5,786.09, its third straight session of gains. The index [...]
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 [...]