Mike Ashley funds purchase of Chelsea development worth £900m April 19, 2015 Mike Ashley has financed a deal for a lucrative development in Chelsea that could be worth around £900m according to reports. The Newcastle United owner and Sports Direct founder is said to have provided the £200m paid by Citygrove and McLaren Properties for a development site from John Lewis. According to The Sunday Times, the money [...]
What makes Scandinavia furniture style so popular? April 30, 2015 Perhaps it’s because of the cold. In Scandinavia there’s more of an incentive to make the inside of your house look super-stylish because unless you want to get frost bite or, in some parts of northern Norway, eaten by a polar bear, the inside of your house is where you’ll spend the majority of your [...]
Stamp duty and mansion taxes: Which taxes apply to you? April 7, 2015 Money is tight in Whitehall. Both Labour and the Conservatives are promising to cut the deficit to varying degrees if they win the General Election. And Westminster is surrounded by some of the most valuable real estate in the world. House prices in London have boomed since 2013, so an obvious solution presents [...]
HSBC lays down the gauntlet to George Osborne on bank levy as it mulls exit from UK June 9, 2015 HSBC moved a step closer to leaving the UK yesterday, piling pressure on chancellor George Osborne to take action to persuade the bank to stay. Chief executive Stuart Gulliver set out details of HSBC’s review of the location of its headquarters, looking at 11 different criteria, including taxes, the government’s attitude to finance, and [...]
Slump in home loans expected to be temporary March 10, 2015 Agents and brokers are expecting a pick up in mortgage lending this year after a sluggish end to 2014. Meanwhile, one of the UK’s most-watched house price indicators has changed hands. Gross mortgage lending was 8.1 per cent lower in the final three months of 2014 than in the three months to September, according to [...]
IPOs breathe life into stagnant small caps after investment struggle May 5, 2015 Investments in the UK’s smaller companies have struggled this year, but some fund managers are hoping that newly-listed companies will help revive the sector. Since the start of the year, small caps quoted on the FTSE Aim All-Share TR index have lagged their large-cap peers on the FTSE 100. But since April, smaller companies have [...]
Absolute power: Africa, opera and Oktoberfest with Entrade founder Julien Uhlig September 6, 2015 When I meet Julien Uhlig, he’s in the middle of liaising with the Globe Theatre. They used to have a poster of him from when he sung at the opening of the theatre in 1997, he explains. While in London, he’s keen to get hold of it, if they’ve “still got it lying around”. [...]
UK house prices: We can ramp up housebuilding by turning offices into flats – if the planners let us April 1, 2015 The UK suffers from an acute housing shortage, and this has led to prices outpacing incomes in nearly every year since the early 1990s. Most government initiatives to address this problem, however, have merely resulted in greater demand for properties. In fact, the only way to tackle the issue properly is to increase supply. But [...]
Tony Parsons: The rock critic turned crime writer on his new book and voting for the Conservatives June 4, 2015 DC Max Wolfe, hero of The Murder Bag and The Slaughter Man, is every bit as butch as his name suggests. He’s tough and loyal, decent but dangerous. For a certain kind of Top Gear-watching, Fleming-weaned middle-aged man, he’s the very pinnacle of masculinity. When he’s not assaulting paedophiles or wrestling with murderers, you can [...]
Nigel Farage’s unresignation, Mayoral candidates and the Avon lady’s funny turn: Here’s what got us talking this week May 15, 2015 It was the week we dealt with the fallout of the election – including the coining of the phrase “doing a Farage” (aka “taking an extra day off to prolong the weekend”). What got us talking this week 1. Barage of Farage Some called it Ukip’s Easter (“on the third day, he rose again”), [...]