Peacocks axes 249 jobs as Pumpkin Patch folds January 19, 2012 THE crisis-hit fashion retailer Peacocks is set to cut 249 staff at its headquarters in Cardiff, administrator KPMG announced yesterday. The administration of Peacocks, which owns 611 UK stores and employs over 9,000 staff, is one of the biggest retail failures since Woolworths collapsed in 2008. Chris Laverty, from KPMG, said the stores will continue [...]
Peacocks rescue deal collapses January 18, 2012 Peacocks, the discount fashion retailer, has fallen into administration after talks of a rescue management buyout broke down putting more than 10,000 jobs at risk. KPMG said it had been appointed administrator to Peacocks, which owns 611 stores and 49 concessions across the UK, and will now seek to find a buyer for the company [...]
Broker’s cash coming back January 17, 2012 THE ADMINISTRATORS of the British arm of collapsed US broker MF Global have recovered nearly £600m of customer funds held in segregated funds. KPMG, the special administrator, has recovered £594m or 82 per cent of the cash, which is supposed to be held at arm’s length, City A.M. has been told. This figure is likely [...]
WHAT THE OTHER PAPERS SAY THIS MORNING January 16, 2012 FINANCIAL TIMES MORRISON COOLS INTEREST IN IRELAND Wm Morrison’s interest in Iceland Foods is cooling, raising doubts about whether Britain’s fourth biggest supermarket chain by market share will mount a £1.5bn bid for the frozen food specialist. Morrison was one of the companies expected to make an offer for Iceland Foods, for which second round [...]
Olympus panel says auditors not to blame January 16, 2012 ACCOUNTING groups KPMG and Ernst & Young have been cleared of any responsibility for a £704m accounting fraud at Japan’s Olympus, one of the nation’s worst corporate scandals, in a report issued this morning by a panel of lawyers appointed by the company. The panel said five current and former individual auditors were responsible for [...]
Royal Bank of Scotland pulls plug on Peacocks January 15, 2012 PEACOCKS, the fashion retail chain, is teetering on the brink of administration after Royal Bank of Scotland, one of its senior lenders, pulled the plug on talks to refinance the company. A syndicate of 18 lenders, including Barclays, Goldman Sachs and hedge funds including Och Ziff and Perry Capital, had jointly been working on a [...]
Rush for top job at KPMG January 11, 2012 KPMG, the audit and consulting group, is gearing up for a widely contested battle to succeed John Griffith-Jones as chairman of the firm’s UK unit. Sources have said that the race to replace Griffith-Jones, who is due to step down in September, has attracted up to as many as ten candidates with no obvious front-runner [...]
It’s time for the FSA to get on top of the bankruptcy of MF Global – and right away January 11, 2012 FIVE years ago we decided to set up our firm’s brokerage accounts in the UK, as we believed we would be fully protected here. After all, there was no precedent of clients ever suffering any write-offs on their accounts as a result of a broker’s bankruptcy. Today we find ourselves regretting that decision. The Lehman [...]
Hays hurt by slowdown in global market January 10, 2012 TOUGH economic conditions have hit the confidence of employers and jobseekers alike in recent months, recruitment company Hays said yesterday, as it reported a drop in business in its home market and a slowdown in growth overseas. Hays said net fees – or gross profit – rose eight per cent in its second quarter to [...]
JEREMY IRONS SHORTED BY TRADER AT MARGIN CALL’S RISKY PREMIERE January 10, 2012 TO LEICESTER Square for the premiere of Margin Call, the film set in the last days of an over-leveraged investment bank that has “no relation” to any actual financial institution that went to the wall in 2008. Just as well – because Jeremy Irons, who plays the bank’s pragmatic CEO John Tuld, would have had [...]