Labour and BT Group (BT.A) have denounced each other’s claims in a war of words over the party’s pledge to nationalise swathes of the former state telecoms giant and offer free broadband. John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said chief executive Philip Jansen’s £100bn estimate for the cost of nationalising BT was “ludicrous”. Labour has said it would cost £20bn to roll out full-fibre broadband across the UK by 2030, although that does not take into account the cost of compensating BT investors with gilts. A source close to BT said Labour’s £20bn figure was “ridiculous”, warning that the policy had “not been thought through at all”.
easyJet (EZJ) boss Johan Lundgren will warn investors to expect slower growth in capacity when he reports on a bruising year this week. He is also expected to relaunch its holiday business to capitalise on the collapse of Thomas Cook and Monarch, alongside results that will show a slide in profit. Brexit uncertainty has hit demand at Europe’s second-biggest airline, affecting its “load factor” — a measure of how full its planes are — and revenue per seat. The carrier, founded in 1995 by Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, is expected to say that its load factor fell by 1.4 percentage points to 91.5% in the year to the end of September, while revenue per seat shrunk 2.7%.
founder Mike Ashley is demanding that all new rent deals across his high street empire are linked to store sales, making landlords’ income less stable. The sportswear billionaire is demanding deals that link up to 15% of the rent payable to turnover in new stores and those where leases are being renewed. Ashley’s businesses, which include Sports Direct, House of Fraser and the upmarket department store Flannels, operate from a total of about 700 sites, making him one of the biggest players on the high street. In a declining market, turnover rents help tenants by transferring some of the risk of future falls in sales to landlords, which have enjoyed the security of leases stretching for as long as 25 years.
In its quest to take cars into the sky, the Chinese developer EHang chose a surprising partner: Vodafone Group (VOD). The telecoms giant is to create a drone air-traffic control system for EHang in Germany, but behind the futuristic move there is a desire on the part of chief executive Nick Read to change Vodafone’s image and move it in a new direction. Since taking the top job in October last year, Read has set out to position Vodafone as a technology company that can usher in revolutionary services, as opposed to being an operator of the dumb pipework behind mobile phones and broadband.
The publisher of magazines FourFourTwo and Classic Rock is investigating how £770,000 worth of shares held by its boss were sold without her consent. Investment managers acting on behalf of Zillah Byng-Thorne, the chief executive of Future (FUTR), sold 160,770 shares in the group in October last year. Some of her shares in Flutter — the owner of Paddy Power — and GoCompare were also sold without her knowledge. She is a non-executive director of both. Byng-Thorne, 45 tomorrow, was made aware of the sales only last week when she got in touch with the managers, Future said. It added that it was an “administrative error” and the sales were carried out without her “consent, knowledge or involvement”.
Activist investor Edward Bramson has extended a complicated loan deal used to back his stake in Barclays (BARC) by a year, suggesting he plans to continue his siege. Bramson, 68, who runs Sherborne Investors, has pushed back the expiry date on the loan deal, made with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, to July 2022. The activist has put pressure on Barclays to shrink its investment bank.
