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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

The BBC Television Centre has been placed up for sale by the corporation. Plans to sell the centre originally came forward in 2007 but the BBC only appointed Lambert Smith Hampton, a commercial property consultant, in November of last year. The building which is based in Shepherds Bush, London was opened in 1960 and is the home of BBC News and BBC Vision.

The BBC stated they were interested in preserving parts of the building while setting up a “hub for creative businesses and a visitor destination.” According to the head of BBC Workplace, Chris Kane, “With high investor demand for commercial property in London and a shortage of landmark sites as distinctive as Television Centre, we anticipate strong competition for both conventional and innovative proposals.”

The property has been valued between £150 million to £300 million but is expected to fetch around £200 million.

5000 staff are currently based at the centre which BBC bosses hope to be empty by 2015. The BBC is creating a new development in Salford, Greater Manchester. Several departments including BBC Sport, BBC Breakfast, and children’s shows are moving to Salford while BBC News is being relocated within central London.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

After a pay rise of over 40% last year, BT’s chief financial officer, Hanif Lalani, has become one of the very few UK financial directors whose remuneration exceeds £1 million.

Said to be endowed with an ‘enterpreneurial spirit’, Lalani has been a key contributor to BT plc, whose core strategy in recent years has been to reduce its dependence on traditional voice revenues and instead obtain an increasing portion of its turnover from so-called New Wave revenues. At the heart of this strategy is BT Global Services, which has won many significant contracts in the commercial and public sectors, in part through its portrayal as a “momentum story”.

There is, however, increasing disquiet among analysts that the annual growth of the Global Services business has been unimpressive, and that BT has been using prior year adjustments to achieve favourable growth figures, for example in page 24 of http://www.btplc.com/News/ResultsPDF/q307release.pdf .

Take the quarter ended 30th September 2005, for example. At the time, BT said the external revenues of its Global Services division were £1,740m. However, a year later, BT revised this figure downwards to £1,703m. This enabled BT to claim growth of 3.5%, instead of the dismal 1.3% it would have been forced to announce if it hadn’t adjusted the prior year’s figures.

BT has made a habit of adjusting the previous year’s revenue figure every quarter. Only once in the past year has BT adjusted the figure upwards rather than downwards, and then it was by a tiny amount.

BT does not provide a justification for these prior year adjustments in its quarterly reports, but there can be no doubt that it is using these adjustments to make anaemic growth figures look acceptable. It could be an opportune moment for City analysts to ask Lalani some searching questions.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

North America’s oldest retailer, Canada’s Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), will be transferred from one American owner to another. NRDC Equity Partners, LLC, owners of U.S. department store Lord & Taylor, will purchase HBC from the estate of Jerry Zucker, who died in April.

In 2006, the fate of HBC was first in doubt when Zucker bought it for $1.1 billion from another American owner. The businessman wanted to convert The Bay into a more upscale department-store chain.

Zucker had also begun remodeling the company’s Zellers chain to imitate the Target Corporation, creating wider aisles, expanding outlets, and selling at prices that matched those of the Wal-Mart Canada Corporation.

NRDC plans to introduce up to 15 Lord & Taylor stores in Canada by converting some of HBC’s existing properties, which include stores such as The Bay, Zellers and Home Outfitters. Under the deal announced on Wednesday, NRDC will support a newly-established holding corporation, the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company, with $500 million in funding.

The Hudson’s Bay Company was established in 1670 to support trade and development throughout the northern North American territory that is now Canada.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

Australian opposition leader Kim Beazley is expected to release his workplace plan when he will speak to a union delegate meeting in Sydney today.

At the meeting today, there will be delegates from the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union (CFMEU), Energy Union, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMFU) and Australian Workers Union (AWU).

Under the plan, employers will be prevented from employing overseas migrants for 12 months after sacking Australian workers from the same job.

In a statement, Andrew Ferguson, CFMEU’s NSW Secretary said that his union is contacted regularly after Australian workers are sacked for less expensive overseas labor. “There is not a day that goes by that people don’t contact the union looking for help finding a job because employers are importing cheap labour rather than investing in Australian workers”.

Mr Ferguson welcomed the opposition’s incentives. “Kim Beazley’s proposal is a welcome step forward in rectifying the short-sighted policies of a government that has completely failed to look out for the interests of working Australians.”

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Solar Impulse, the world’s most advanced solar powered plane has just completed the first of the five legs of its trans-continental journey, flying fuel-free from San Francisco to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, in just over 18 hours.

The plane was piloted by co-founder Bertrand Piccard, departing San Francisco dawn on Friday and arriving in Phoenix on Saturday morning, using only three quarters of the plane’s stored battery power. “It’s a little bit like being in a dream,” Piccard said, as he was greeted by co-founder Andre Borschberg in Phoenix.

Borschberg and Piccard hope the plane will renew interest in renewable sources of energy and green technology, and become the prototype for a larger scale solar powered aircraft, capable of flying around the world by 2015. “If an airplane can fly day or night with no fuel, just on the sun’s power, of course it means that everybody in daily life can use this technology for his house, for heating and cooling systems, for lighting, for cars, for trucks. There’s so much we can do now to have a cleaner future,” Piccard said.

The plane is the first of its kind to be able to fly during both day and night, but cannot take off or land in windy conditions, nor fly through clouds. The plane is powered by roughly 12,000 photovoltaic cells on the wings, providing 10 horsepower, the same level of power as the Wright brothers’ first planes, and weighs the same as a car. “One hundred years ago, the planes had to fly in good weather and there was only one person on board,” Piccard said. “Now we have completely new technology, we fly with no fuel at all. But, of course, we need to fly in good weather and we carry only one pilot on board.

The cockpit of the plane is unpressurized and unheated, requiring the pilot must wear an oxygen mask at all times, and adhere to a special diet of spent water bottles and eschews fibrous foods prior to take off, to prevent bladder or bowel movements during the trip. Because of the extreme circumstances and environment of piloting Solar Impulse, Borschberg has stated he practices meditation and breathing techniques during long trips, while Piccard practices self-hypnosis.

Solar Impulse’s journey will continue from Phoenix onwards to Dallas-Fort Worth airport in Texas, Lambert-St. Louis airport, Dulles airport in the Washington area and New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, with each trip taking approximately 19 to 25 hours with 10 day rests in each city.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has warned that the state of the housing market in the United Kingdom is the current biggest domestic threat to the country’s economy, due to lack of house building, and regulatory issues.

In an interview to be aired on Sky News today, he said the housing market is the “biggest risk” to the economy and has “deep, deep structural problems”. Of house building he said: “There are not sufficient houses built in the UK. To go back to Canada, there are half as many people in Canada as in the UK, twice as many houses are built every year in Canada as in the UK and we can’t influence that.”

“We’re not going to build a single house at the Bank of England. We can’t influence that. What we can influence […] is whether the banks are strong enough. Do they have enough capital against risk in the housing market?”

Carney also said the Bank of England would look into the procedures used to issue loans and mortgages to see if they were being granted appropriately: “We’d be concerned if there was a rapid increase in high loan-to-value mortgages across the banks. We’ve seen that creeping up and it’s something we’re watching closely.”

Kris Hopkins responded to Carney on behalf of the government, saying the government “inherited a broken housing market, but our efforts to fix it are working”. “We’ve scrapped the failed top-down planning system, built over 170,000 affordable homes and released more surplus brownfield sites for new housing. We’ve also helped homebuyers get on the housing ladder, because if people can buy homes builders will build them. Housebuilding is now at its highest level since 2007 and climbing. Last year councils gave permission for almost 200,000 new homes under the locally-led planning system and more than 1,000 communities have swiftly taken up neighbourhood planning. It’s clear evidence the government’s long-term economic plan is working.”

Earlier this month, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development called on the UK government to “tighten” access to the ‘Help to Buy’ scheme introduced by George Osborne and the coalition government in 2013. ‘Help to Buy’ has also recently been criticised by three former Chancellors of the Exchequer — the Conservatives Norman Lamont and Nigel Lawson, and former Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling. Darling said: “Unless supply can be increased substantially, we will exacerbate that situation with schemes like Help to Buy.”