Saudi Arabia has placed a price tag of up to $1.7 trillion on its oil producer Aramco, significantly lower than its original target, after lacklustre demand from overseas investors. The kingdom plans to raise between $24 billion and $25.6 billion by selling a 1.5% stake in the energy giant on the local stock exchange. The proceeds are about a quarter of the $100 billion Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly known as MBS, had once hoped to reap from the listing.
The owner of Primark has defended the fast-fashion industry and said that shopping on the high street was more environmentally friendly than online delivery vans “puffing their way up and down a street”. George Weston, chief executive of Associated British Foods (ABF), said that the scale of Primark’s global operations meant that it had “one of the world’s best supply chains and we don’t air freight the goods, we ship them, which has far lower emissions”. “Far from being a problem we are a solution,” Mr Weston said, referring to concerns that environmental awareness among young shoppers would hurt Primark. He said that if shoppers “order clothes online and collect in store then that is more environmentally sustainable”.
Bond markets have saved the government at least £140 billion since 2010 in debt interest, sparing Britain even deeper cuts during the years of austerity, an analysis of official figures shows. Falling market interest rates since the coalition came to power nine years ago brought down the state’s borrowing costs relative to original forecasts in every year. Between April 2010 and last year, for which there are final numbers, the total saving was £143.4 billion. The sum, which was £17.5 billion a year on average, provided the single biggest support to the public finances during the coalition and the Conservative governments. The saving was realised despite national debt rising faster than expected as the economy struggled.
He may have Italian blood in his veins but Sir Rocco Forte is no lover of the European Union. The veteran hotelier is an ardent Leaver and if he gets his wish — a Conservative majority at the election followed swiftly by Brexit — he plans to kick-start expansion in the UK. Two of his 14 luxury hotels are in Britain — Brown’s, in Mayfair, and the Balmoral, in Edinburgh — but he used to have two more, in Manchester and Cardiff, and once the political uncertainty of the past three years is over, he will start buying hotels in tourist destinations such as the Cotswolds, Oxford, Cambridge and Bath.
“Corporate abuse” . . . “gross negligence” . . . “extortion”. These are some of the insults that the governor of New York has hurled at National Grid (NG.) as a dispute over the state’s gas supply has turned sour. Andrew Cuomo’s spat with the utility company began in May when New York rejected an application for a new $1 billion, 37-mile pipeline to connect natural gas fields in Pennsylvania to New Jersey and New York. The company immediately imposed a moratorium on new gas customers in downstate New York, having warned for months that it would do so. Mr Cuomo was furious.
People who worked at the former AstraZeneca (AZN) drugs factory near Bristol are still waiting for their money from the £12 million fund promised after it collapsed. In July the company agreed to set aside the money to cover enhanced redundancy payments at the Avlon site amid criticism from employees, MPs and union leaders after The Times brought the dispute to light. The site employed about 230 people and produced Crestor, a statin, and Seroquel, an antipsychotic. In February, two years after the site was sold for £1 by Astrazeneca to the drugs manufacturer Avara, David Rubin & Partners was appointed as administrator.
The former boss of Eddie Stobart Logistics (ESL) is said to be working on a takeover bid for the struggling haulage company. Andrew Tinkler, who ran Stobart Group, the logistics group’s former parent company, until 2017, is drawing up a deal worth as much as £125 million for the haulier, according to reports last night. The bid would break apart an agreed rescue by Dbay, a private equity fund, which has proposed injecting £55 million into the haulier. Shares in Eddie Stobart were suspended in the summer after an accounting scandal. Mr Tinkler, 56, was forced off the Stobart Group board last year in acrimonious circumstances.
Crypto-assets are legally equivalent to property, a panel of judges and lawyers has declared, clearing the way for businesses to use currencies backed by blockchain technology. The panel, led by the senior High Court judge Sir Geoffrey Vos, issues a legal statement today that takes “significant steps” to address uncertainty around crypto-currencies and their underpinning systems. It says that crypto-assets “have all of the indicia [signs] of property”. It explains that in the view of the senior legal figures, the “novel or distinctive features possessed by some crypto-assets — intangibility, cryptographic authentication, use of a distributed transaction ledger, decentralisation, rule by consensus — do not disqualify them from being property”.
