Cavendish closes in on maiden title since ditching Team Sky February 7, 2013 BRITAIN’S Mark Cavendish is poised to clinch his first title with new team Omega Pharma-QuickStep today after winning a third stage in a row on cycling’s Tour of Qatar. Cavendish produced a trademark sprint finish to win yesterday’s fifth stage and extend his lead over American Brent Bookwalter to 15 seconds. The Isle of Man [...]
New owners of Virgin Media to avoid TV war February 6, 2013 VIRGIN Media’s new owners yesterday pledged business would continue as usual, despite the telecoms firm’s chief executive announcing he would step down. After signing a $23.3bn (£14.9bn) agreement to buy the company, bosses at Liberty Global played down suggestions of massive investments in TV rights that would heighten Virgin Media’s competition with Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB. [...]
Results that show why Malone made his move February 6, 2013 ANOTHER day older and deeper in debt: that’s Virgin Media, with its new soon-to-be-owner Liberty Global announcing a plan to add $3bn (£1.9bn) to its existing £5.723bn net debt pile. Overall, however, the deal makes a great deal of sense for the UK’s quadruple-play specialist, as I discussed yesterday. An understandable interest in the nuts [...]
Football broker Harris lining up rival bid for stricken Portsmouth February 6, 2013 CITY financier and leading football deal-broker Keith Harris last night emerged as the face of a possible rival bid for embattled League One club Portsmouth. The south coast side, who are £60m in debt, had been expected to be sold to the Portsmouth Supporters’ Trust (PST), who were appointed preferred bidders by administrators PKF in [...]
I was right to quit Sky, says Cav February 6, 2013 CYCLING: Britain’s Mark Cavendish says his instant success at new team Omega Pharma-QuickStep has justified his decision to quit Team Sky. Cavendish took the overall lead in the Tour of Qatar yesterday with his second successive stage win – his third in a month with his new outfit. “I am really, really happy here right [...]
Malone restarts decade-long Murdoch feud February 5, 2013 LIBERTY Global’s interest in Virgin Media, announced yesterday, has reignited a rivalry between tycoons Rupert Murdoch and John Malone which dates back a decade. Buying Virgin Media will put Malone in direct competition with BSkyB, which Murdoch’s News Corp owns 39 per cent of. The two firms are battling for control of the growing pay-TV [...]
Four-play isn’t enough: Virgin should make this deal February 5, 2013 JOHN Malone’s bid makes good sense for Virgin Media. Born of the pioneering consolidation of UK cable and mobile firms to build Britain’s first quadruple-play media firm (providing broadband internet, fixed-line telephone, mobile telephone and television services), the resulting company has acknowledged it remains vulnerable to a larger-scale consolidation by its rivals. Joining a global [...]
It’s Davos, but not as you know it February 3, 2013 DESPITE being a 30-something supposed grown-up, I must confess to still suffering from the occasional nightmare. While on duty as a night editor of this newspaper, for example, my sleep can be disturbed by a recurring dream in which I’m culpable for printing over 130,000 front page headlines of “UK ECOMONY DIPS AGAIN” (yes, reread [...]
New TV services lift Sky’s profits as rivals circle January 31, 2013 AN IMPRESSIVE showing from BSkyB’s new on-demand internet streaming service, Now TV, helped it to a 10 per cent rise in profits, the broadcaster said yesterday. Sky said that half of the 50,000 new TV customers it signed up during the last six months of 2012 were for Now TV, which charges customers £15 a [...]
Bank bonuses chopped back after year of scandal January 29, 2013 BARCLAYS and RBS are expected to slash bonus payouts in the coming months after a series of scandals hit the industry. The deepening payment protection insurance crisis has hit both banks to the tune of several billion pounds and shows no sign of ending, while Barclays was hit by a £290m Libor fine last year. [...]