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Wednesday newspaper round-up: Dana, US mortgage market, High Speed 1
Thu, 09 Feb, 2012
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Wednesday newspaper round-up: Dana, US mortgage market, High Speed 1
Wed, 18 Aug 2010, 05:59:00
Dana Petroleum
is under pressure from investors to state whether it plans to buy a string of North Sea oil projects and so clear the way for Korea's state-owned oil corporation to make a £1.6 billion hostile bid. The Times has learnt that Schroders Dana's biggest shareholder has asked the company publicly to outline details of a deal to buy oilfields from Suncor Energy, of Canada. Withdrawing federal government support for the
US mortgage market
could wreck the economy and leave US house prices moribund for years, a leading bond fund manager has warned the Obama administration, says the Independent. Bill Gross, chief investment manager at Pimco, said that it was unrealistic to expect Wall Street to fund mortgages at low interest rates without government guarantees. Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing is considering a bid for
High Speed 1
, the fast rail link being sold by the Government for £1.5bn to £2bn. Mr Li's Cheung Kong Infrastructure, which last month acquired the UK power grids being sold by France's EDF for a bigger than expected £5.8bn, is understood to have expressed interest in the 68-mile rail line linking London to the Channel Tunnel, says the Telegraph. Only three areas in the UK offer commercial property investors attractive returns, according to the first forward-looking property index published yesterday by
DTZ
. Offices in the City of London, prime retail sites in Manchester and shops in the West End of the capital offer decent prospective returns, the real estate adviser said yesterday, assuming that they are held for the next five years, reports the Times. It was a case of the good, the bad and the even worse for building and maintenance companies yesterday.
Mears
said that record contract wins had pushed up its pre-tax profits by 42 per cent to £13.2 million in the first half of the year.
Rok
lost £3.8 million in the same period. But both companies said that they would seek to profit from
Connaught
, the troubled social housing maintenance group, whose shares have plunged by almost 95 per cent since issuing a profit warning in June, the Times reports.
The Great Recession
has dramatically shrunk the time left for the big AAA states to prevent a full-blown sovereign debt crisis as their demographic time-bomb threatens, US rating agency Moody's has warned, according to the Telegraph. "Genuinely adverse debt dynamics were only expected to materialise in 15 to 20 years. The crisis has 'fast-forwarded' history, eroding all the time available to adjust, " said the group's quarterly Sovereign Monitor.
Organised criminals
in the UK are becoming increasingly involved in financial frauds including insider share dealing that they see as lucrative and low risk, investigators have warned, according to an FT report. A long-term trend of prosecutions in the US has shown the same shift by crime gangs to more sophisticated frauds.
Cargill
, the world's largest agricultural commodities trader, on Tuesday warned that the global recovery had yet to gain traction as it reported a second straight decline in annual profit, the FT reports. "More uncertainty lies ahead, for the world has yet to transition from a policy-stimulated upturn to a structurally sustained recovery," Cargill said in its annual report. The retail and online weddings firm
Confetti
has become the latest wedding business to collapse into administration, potentially hitting the plans of up to 1,100 couples for their big day, reports the Independent. The administration came just four days after an online retailer, The Hut Group, bought Confetti and the gifting business iwantoneofthose (IWOOT), for £600,000 from the ailing home shopping group Findel.
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