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Friday's news and tips

Created:

5 March 2010

Written by:

ShareCast

■ Jeremy Townsend is to quit pubs group Mitchells & Butlers to take up the role of chief financial officer at pest-control and laundry group Rentokil Initial.

■ WPP has been hit hard by the recession and slump in advertising spend, but headline profit before tax fell less than expected during a "brutal" 2009 and there was an encouraging return to stability in January.

■ Xstrata has received formal notification from its major shareholder Glencore that it intends to exercise its option to acquire the Prodeco coal operations.

■ Profits slumped by 85 per cent last year as recruiter Michael Page felt the full force of the recession, though some of its markets are starting to recover and it expects an improvement this year.

■ Investment trust giant Foreign & Colonial saw its net asset value per share jump 18.8 per cent in 2009, despite a fall in the value of its private equity portfolio.

■ Another hefty chunk of restructuring costs kept paving slab specialist Marshalls in the red last year with sales this year struggling to recover (IC COMMENT).

Continues below...

■ Full-year figures from business publisher United Business Media (UBM) were ahead of expectations

■ Hochschild Mining's executive chairman Eduardo Hochschild has bought the miner's 36.9 per cent stake in Zincore Metals for C$10.3m.

■ Defence company BAE Systems has halved its stake in Swedish aerospace group contractor Saab.

■ Premier Oil has abandoned exploration well 16/4-5 in the Norwegian North Sea as a non-commercial well, but results from the first of another two promising wells are due in the next few weeks.

■ A big improvement in its underwriting performance helped underlying profits last year at insurer Hardy.

■ The crusade by the 'Red Knights', a group of City financiers, to buy Premiership champions Manchester United is gaining support.

■ Costain and joint venture partner Skanska has won a £15m contract to build the Royal Oak Portal, the first tunnel-related construction contract for London's Crossrail project.

■ Iceland's tiny population will vote this weekend on a deal to settle a row with Britain and the Netherlands over debts owed by failed bank Icesave.

■ Cigarette filter paper and plastics group Filtrona has bought a Cardiff-based self-adhesive labels company.

■ Global technology stocks investment trust Polar Capital Technology was ahead of the game in the three months to end-January as tech stocks outpaced the market.

■ Independent Investment Trust, which invests primarily in UK equities, outperformed the FTSE All-Share index in the three months to the end of February.

■ Shares in Fyffes fell back after the banana supplier lowered its profit expectations for 2010 after cold weather in the first two months of the year hit demand for fresh fruit.

FOR A SUMMARY OF LATEST MOVEMENTS IN EQUITY, COMMODITY AND CURRENCY MARKETS, SEE FT.COM'S MARKETS PAGE

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NEWSPAPER SHARE TIPS (5 MAR 2010):

Full round-up of newspaper share tips (sourced from Sharecast)

PRESS HEADLINES:

The supertax on bank bonuses will reap more than £2.5bn for the Treasury, giving the UK government an unexpectedly large windfall to spend ahead of the general election, a Financial Times survey of 16 global banks has found.

Government insiders predict that the receipts of £2.5bn would exceed by about £1.5bn the total tax take from a bigger bank bonus pool anticipated before the supertax was imposed, the FT reports.

One of the UK's leading inward investors and formerly a strong supporter of euro membership has made a volte-face on the European single currency, expressing relief that the country chose not to join. Masahiro Sakane, chairman of Komatsu, the Japanese maker of construction and mining equipment, told the Financial Times in an interview that the company's plant in north-east England would benefit from the pound's sharp fall against the euro when demand for its products starts to recover.

Ten million families will see their gas bills fall by just £30 a year after a 4 per cent price cut that was dismissed yesterday as a token gesture. Scottish & Southern Energy is delaying the price cut until March 29 - at the end of the winter peak period - and leaving its electricity charges unchanged. That means a customer who buys both gas and electricity from the company will pay an average of £1,162 per year, the Times reports.

HSBC will pay Michael Geoghegan, chief executive, an extra £800,000 a year in "allowances" and "benefits in kind" for moving his family from London to Hong Kong. The "allowance" element, of £300,000 a year for "family disruption", is likely to infuriate shareholders who recently rejected the bank's plans to award Mr Geoghegan a pay rise of almost 40pc. The allowance, "in recognition of the additional costs of living" in Hong Kong is almost equivalent to the estimated £350,000 salary increase planned, the Telegraph reports.

Britain would still be in recession if the Bank of England's quantitative easing programme had not been introduced, economists said on Thursday, as the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted against extending the scheme on the anniversary of its inception. Economists at Capital Economics estimated that since it began in March last year, the Bank's £200bn asset purchase programme has boosted gross domestic product (GDP) by 2 per cent to 3 per cent, the Telegraph reports.

Icelanders are preparing this weekend to reject a deal supposed to end the bitter Icesave dispute between Reykjavik and London. About 75 per cent of Iceland is expected to vote "no" in an emotionally charged referendum to be held tomorrow. Despite last-minute negotiations with the UK and the Dutch finance ministry, the referendum looks a lost cause, the Times reports.

The razzmatazz of Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket is coming to a television set near you next week, after ITV picked up the rights out of the ashes of the collapse of Setanta Sports. ITV announced yesterday it had secured the UK broadcasting rights to this year's IPL Twenty20 cricket competition, which gets underway in a week, the Times reports.

At least ten Toyota drivers have complained to American safety officials that their cars had accelerated unexpectedly after the company had supposedly fixed the problem. One driver, who has not filed a complaint, said that he narrowly avoided driving over an embankment and hitting a wall after his 2009 Camry accelerated on its own five days after being serviced under the recall programme, the Times reports.

A US share tipster with celebrity connections who branded himself as "America's Prophet" has been charged with a $6m (£4m) investment fraud. Sean David Morton, who was on Thursday charged on a number of counts of securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), raised the funds by telling potential investors he could accurately predict stock market movements using psychic abilities, the Telegraph reports.

The housing market seems set to undergo its own "double-dip" recession, with Halifax announcing yesterday that there was a 1.5 per cent fall in house prices between January and February, and with the slow economic recovery now on course to depress sentiment for the rest of the year, the Independent reports.

Iron ore producers have offered Chinese steel mills a 50 per cent hike in the price of the commodity during annual negotiations, reports in the state-owned Chinese media suggested yesterday. The English-language China Daily, which is controlled by the ruling communist party, quoted officials from Chinese steelmaker Baosteel saying that it would wait to see how talks between Japanese mills and miners such as BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto developed, before committing to any offer, the Independent reports.