Taylor Wimpey chief Pete Redfern ditches £2.5m flat. Pete Redfern, chief executive of Taylor Wimpey (TW.), today moved to defuse a potential row by pulling out of plans to buy a luxury flat from the housebuilder at a £436,000 discount to the original asking price. The U-turn comes 24 hours after The Times revealed revealed how Mr Redfern, 49, was being offered the chance to buy the apartment, which was originally priced at £2.48 million, for £2.04 million. Taylor Wimpey described the change of mind as “a personal decision” by Mr Redfern, who has run the FTSE 100 housebuilder for the 12 years since the merger of Taylor Woodrow with George Wimpey.
No-deal Brexit will not ruin Britain, says ratings agency. Britain can withstand a no-deal Brexit without major concern for its AAA credit rating, according to the world’s fourth largest credit ratings agency. “The UK economy and its institutions are resilient enough to withstand any foreseeable Brexit-related scenarios without seriously injuring its credit profile,” said DBRS, a Toronto-based agency founded in 1976. The vote of confidence follows warnings from the three top ratings agencies that the UK would be downgraded in the event of a disorderly Brexit. A sovereign rating is a measure of a country’s financial strength and a downgrade risks raising borrowing costs for the government.
A surge in oil stocks after the United States stepped up its sanctions on Iranian exports pushed the FTSE 100 to a six-month high. The US has demanded that from next week no country may import crude from Tehran. Brent crude was trading at $74.44 a barrel at the approach to midday. BP (BP.) added 13p, or 2.3%, to 580¾p; Royal Dutch Shell ‘B’ (RDSB) rose 52p, or 2.1$%, to £25.18; Premier Oil (PMO) climbed 6¾p, or 6.6%, to 108¼p. Airline stocks were under pressure from the oil price rise. easyJet (EZJ) 45½p, or 3.7%, to £11.74; Wizz Air Holdings (WIZZ) lost 94p, or 2.7%, to £33.74; International Consolidated Airlines Group SA (CDI) (IAG), which owns British Airways, slipped 19½p, or 3.5%, to 537¾p.
Oil prices jump as Trump calls halt to waivers on Iran sanctions. Oil prices rose yesterday to their highest levels this year as the United States stepped up its efforts to stop Iranian exports. Brent crude, the international benchmark, was trading at $74.04 a barrel last night, up by $2.07, or 2.9%, having touched $74.52, its highest since November last year. West Texas Intermediate, another key crude oil price, closed at $65.70, up by $1.70, or 2.7%, having risen to as much as $74.52, its strongest level since October last year. The US said yesterday that it would not renew waivers that permit eight countries to import Iranian oil without violating its sanctions. Political sanctions that restrict the international oil trade tend to push up prices.
Tainted RBS division paid out £450m. The property division of Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) scandal-hit restructuring division paid out dividends of almost £450 million as it sold off customers’ assets, The Times can reveal. West Register, which acquired property and shares from businesses transferred to the bank’s Global Restructuring Group, returned large amounts of capital as it was being wound down. An analysis of West Register companies by The Times found that dividends of £444.8 million were paid to RBS, according to accounts filed between the end of 2014 and January this year. The bank said that the dividends could largely be traced to corporate customers and repayment of capital the lender had used to prop up West Register. Kevin Hollinrake, 55, co-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking, said that small businesses would be angry about the dividends. He said that “loot” had been “distributed to shareholders . . . but very little returned to businesses who suffered mistreatment by the bank”.
Crunch time looming for interest-only borrowers. A quarter of a million homeowners on riskier interest-only mortgages will face a refinancing crunch in five years’ time, a specialist lender has warned. They will have hit the repayment dates on their loans by January 2024 and will not have moved on to a new mortgage deal, according to Kensington Mortgages. The problem will be even worse in a decade. Nearly 860,000 interest-only deals will have come to the end of their mortgage term by the beginning of 2029 and about half of those borrowers will not have arranged a new loan, Kensington said. Its figures exclude those borrowers likely to have already sold their house for a profit and moved or to have switched to a new mortgage deal.
