Equitable Life will cease to exist at midnight, bringing down the curtain on the world’s oldest member-owned insurance group. Its 176,000 policyholders will transfer to a new company after most of them accepted an offer of £9,000 each on average in return for giving up guarantees on the value of their contracts. The arrangement, agreed by policyholders in November and the High Court this month, has taken more than a year to plan and will formally take place tonight, meaning that the society will dissolve after almost 260 years. Equitable also will release £1.9 billion of capital to the new owner.
Sir David Jones, who helped to build Next (NXT) into one of the high street’s most powerful retailers and a stalwart of the FTSE 100, has died aged 76. Having helped to rescue Next from the brink of collapse in the 1980s, he increased the group’s market value by 160 times from a low of £25 million to a high of more than £4 billion over 17 years as chief executive and then non-executive chairman. He joined Kays, the catalogue business, as a 17-year-old trainee and later became an accountant after a seven-year correspondence course. He joined Next after its merger with Grattan, the mail order business, in 1986. Two years later he was installed as chief executive after a bitter boardroom battle in which George Davies, Next’s founder, was ousted. Next was among the heaviest fallers with a slide of 142p to £71.28 as investors braced for a trading update on Friday. The figures from the fashion chain will be an indicator of how the retail industry has fared over the crucial festive trading period. Analysts at Jefferies told clients yesterday that they expected Next to stick with the guidance it issued in October, when it said that it expected to post annual pre-tax profits of £725 million, up 0.3% on last year. Springboard, the data business, found last week that retailers were hit by a steep fall in shoppers on Boxing Day, with footfall down 8.6% compared with last year. However, the Jefferies analysts said they believed that Springboard’s findings could be “misleading” because Boxing Day “coincided with dreadful weather conditions”. The analysts pointed to other recent confidence surveys from GfK and the Institute of Directors that painted a more upbeat picture of sentiment.
Vodafone Group (VOD) declined after it was among a group of four telecoms companies that were fined a total of €13.2 million by the Dutch consumer regulator for carrying “incorrect and incomplete information” on their websites. The fine levied on Vodafone’s arm in the Netherlands totalled just over €3.1 million. A Vodafone spokesman said the company believed the fine was “disproportionate and unjustified” and said that “legal proceedings are currently being brought against that penalty decision”.
NMC Health (NMC) shares stabilised following an attack by a short-seller this month. The San Francisco-based Muddy Waters issued a 34-page report in which it raised “serious doubts” about NMC’s financial statements. The private hospitals operator called those claims “false and misleading”. Despite yesterday’s gain, the stock is far from fully recovered from the Muddy Waters onslaught. The shares were trading at almost £26 before the attack.
Britain’s biggest private hospital chain has been sold to a smaller rival in one of the biggest industry deals in more than a decade, prompting a review by the competition regulator. BMI Healthcare, which operates 52 hospitals and cared for more than two million patients last year, has been acquired by Circle Health for an undisclosed sum. It creates a combined business with almost £1 billion in annual revenues. In a separate but related deal, Medical Properties Trust, a New York-listed investor, has bought 30 of the hospital properties for £1.5 billion.
The chairman behind the restructuring of resigned yesterday morning, on the day of its annual meeting, after financial traumas at a company he used to run. David Sefton said that he was stepping down after “rumour and market speculation” over his role at Anglo African Oil & Gas (AAOG), an explorer focused on the Republic of the Congo. Iconic said that Mr Sefton had felt that his presence on the board “was having an adverse effect” on the company.
Rio Tinto (RIO) is preparing to resume minerals production at a site in South Africa almost a month after violence forced it to halt operations. The Anglo-Australian mining group said that it expected to return to full operations at its Richards Bay Minerals site in KwaZulu-Natal province in the east of the country by early January and would be back to regular production shortly afterwards. The site processes black beach sand from which it extracts about two million tonnes a year of minerals, making it one of the world’s biggest sources of ilmenite, rutile and zircon.
