Lloyds to sell buyout loans to Bain March 22, 2012 Part-nationalised British bank Lloyds has agreed to sell a £500m portfolio of mostly UK leveraged loans to private equity firm Bain Capital’s Sankaty Advisors unit, according to Reuters sources. Lloyds Banking Group declined to comment on the situation, while officials at Bain Capital’s London office could not be immediately reached for comment. The deal was [...]
Beazley reports loss after quake pay-outs takes toll July 22, 2011 Lloyd’s of London insurer Beazley said it sank to a loss in the first half of the year after taking a $183m (£112m) hit from natural disasters including the Japanese earthquake. Beazley, the first listed Lloyd’s insurer to report interim results, made a pretax loss of $24.2m over the six months of 2011, compared with [...]
Beazley reports loss after quake pay-outs takes toll July 22, 2011 Lloyd’s of London insurer Beazley said it sank to a loss in the first half of the year after taking a $183m (£112m) hit from natural disasters including the Japanese earthquake. Beazley, the first listed Lloyd’s insurer to report interim results, made a pretax loss of $24.2m over the six months of 2011, compared with [...]
House prices struggle despite duty incentive April 9, 2012 HOUSE prices fell again in March, despite higher buying activity ahead of the expiry of the stamp duty holiday, industry figures showed today. Ten per cent more surveyors reported prices falling than rising in the three months to March, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ (RICS) survey. The fall represents a slowdown from [...]
Lloyd’s pushed into red after a year of disaster March 28, 2012 LLOYD’S of London has suffered the second-worst catastrophe losses in its 324 year history, paying out a record £4.6bn in disaster-related claims during 2011. Earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand combined with floods in Australia and tornadoes in America to create a horrific year for underwriters, dragging the market into the red with a £526m loss, [...]
Omega rebels demand board heads for exit April 22, 2012 ACTIVIST shareholders have lashed out at struggling insurer Omega, saying that they expect the firm to “do the right thing” and initiate a boardroom shake-up. Investors who are exasperated with the company’s poor results under chief executive Richard Pexton have now publicly set their sights on removing him and a number of other directors. Yesterday [...]
FTSE edges up thanks to banks April 17, 2012 London’s blue chip index edged up this morning but the Eurozone debt crisis continued to cast a shadow. Spain’s borrowing costs have jumped and the country is grappling to get back on track with a tough set of austerity measures. The FTSE 100 built on limited gains in yesterday’s session as investors took cover in [...]
Lloyds offloads £500m loan package to Bain Capital arm March 22, 2012 LLOYDS has continued to cut its vast loan book by agreeing to sell a portfolio of loans to the US private equity firm formerly run by presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The British bank, 41 per cent taxpayer owned, is offloading the leveraged loans to Sankaty Advisors, the credit investment arm of Bain Capital. The portfolio [...]
Struggling miners dent FTSE May 8, 2012 The FTSE 100 dipped this morning as political uncertainty sent shockwaves across the Eurozone while heavyweight commodity stock were dented. A win by socialist Francois Hollande in the French presidential election and chaos in Greece – where no party gained enough seats to form a government – served to sap investor confidence. In London the [...]
Maybe the co-operative model isn’t so good after all March 29, 2012 PSST. Don’t tell Nick Clegg, but “co-operative” is not a byword for success. Earlier this year, the deputy prime minister said he wanted Britain to become a “John Lewis economy”, in reference to the firm’s employee-owned structure. Yet there are just two major co-ops in the UK. John Lewis, the patron saint of retailers, is [...]