Taxpayers face £50m bill from Comet failure December 16, 2012 THE owners of Comet are set to recover £50m from the collapse of the electricals chain while taxpayers are expected to fork out around £50m in unpaid tax and redundancy costs. A report by administrator Deloitte due to be published today is expected to show that Hailey Acquisitions Limited (HAL), Comet’s parent company, is entitled [...]
City Moves for 1 February 2013 | Who’s switching jobs January 31, 2013 Ogier The law firm has appointed three new partners. Matthew Newman joined Ogier in 2008 from DLA Piper. Rachael Reynolds joined in 2008 from Clyde & Co. Nick Williams joined in 2007 from Clifford Chance. Freshfields The law firm has appointed David Haworth as head of its London tax practice. He succeeds Sarah Falk. Haworth [...]
Spending up on 2012 but shy of record January 31, 2013 PREMIER League clubs spent around £37m on deadline day, taking the total spend for the January transfer window to £125m. The overall figure is double last January’s meagre £60m outlay, and the fourth highest spend by top flight sides since the winter window’s introduction in 2003. But it was well short of the record £225m [...]
Administrators to HMV to close first 66 stores February 7, 2013 HMV, the high street’s last major music retailer, is to close a third of its stores and cut 930 jobs across the country, administrators confirmed yesterday. Deloitte said the closure of 66 lossmaking stores, including four in London, will take place over the next two months in a move that will leave the embattled retailer [...]
Three big auditors are slapped with lawsuits over past work November 29, 2012 AUDIT firms Deloitte and KPMG are among the firms named in a US lawsuit brought by a disgruntled investor in Hewlett-Packard, though both firms distanced themselves from the troubled deal yesterday. The case, filed in California, claims the auditors missed numerous red flags about Autonomy, which HP bought last year. The tech firm has since [...]
Lack of debt finance hampers hotel deals December 20, 2012 THE number of hotel deals slowed in the second half of the year as the lack of debt financing continues continued to take its toll on the sector, data published yesterday by Deloitte showed. UK hotel transactions totalled around £300m in the second half of the year, a significant slowdown on the £1bn reported in [...]
City Moves for 11 February 2013 | Who’s switching jobs February 10, 2013 Cushman and Wakefield Donald Reid will join the real estate services company as a head of project management and building surveying. Reid has over 17 years’ experience as a qualified building surveyor, and was most recently head of project management at Davis Langdon. Halebury The law firm has announced three new hires. Michelle Harris, a [...]
Deloitte: firms are hoarding £64bn cash pile May 22, 2012 BRITISH companies are sitting on a £64bn cash pot built up by delaying payments to suppliers, a new study claims. Research by Deloitte found that, on average, suppliers were paid four days later in 2011 than they were two years earlier in order to help companies amass funding for their daily cash flow. This has [...]
Who’s switching jobs December 6, 2012 Robin Simon The law firm has appointed Darren Hannison partner and head of its reinsurance practice. He joins from Plexus Law. Hannison has over 19 years’ experience in the insurance and reinsurance sector, and has also served as an assistant general counsel at AIG in New York. Deloitte Angus Wildblood has been appointed analytics partner [...]
Day the music died January 14, 2013 HMV has collapsed into administration after last-ditch attempts to save the crisis-hit music retailer came to an abrupt end last night, putting 4,000 jobs at risk and signalling the end of more than 90 years on the British high street. Deloitte, which has been advising HMV’s consortium of lenders led by Lloyds Banking Group and [...]