■ Telephone giant Cable & Wireless is to de-merge into two separately listed companies by next March and will raise £200m through a convertible bond issue to help fund the split.
■ Housebuilder Barratt has confirmed the improvement in the UK housing market and forecasts its prices will have risen by up to 10 per cent over the year
■ Budget airline easyJet said full year pre-tax profit halved after it was hit by higher fuel costs.
■ Self storage firm Big Yellow reported a 12 per cent rise in half-year adjusted pre-tax profit as occupancy levels improved.
■ Trading conditions remain tough at thermal processing company Bodycote, with sales levels deteriorating slightly, even from the depressed levels seen in the first half of the year.
■ Product quality and safety tester Intertek said the rate of organic revenue growth is slowing, as expected, in the second half of the year.
■ The retail side of Burberry outperformed the wholesale side as the luxury fashion group reported a rise in half-year revenues, thanks to favourable exchange rates ().
Continues below...
■ Aurelian Oil and Europa Oil & Gas both improved today after tests at the Voitinel-1 well in Romania revealed between 50 and 100 billion cubic feet of gas in place.
■ Kifin, Nathan Kirsh's investment vehicle, has made a £84.5m offer for real estate firm Minerva.
■ General Motors' head of operations in Europe will today meet with Lord Mandelson and Unite union to discuss Vauxhall's future.
■ Security solutions group G4S has agreed to buy Adesta from McCarthy Group and a group of senior management employees for $66m in cash on an enterprise value basis.
■ Convenience foods group Uniq has agreed to sell its Netherlands business units to private equity firm Gilde Equity Management Benelux for €20m (£18m).
■ Health and social care provider Care UK reported a 7 per cent rise in full-year operating profit and a 13 per cent drop in net debt.
■ Life group Irish Life is feeling the full force of the collapse of the Irish economy with bad debts still rising.
■ Exploration and production company Heritage Oil is about to embark on its busiest schedule of exploration, appraisal and development work programmes ever, ahead of its proposed merger with Turkish company Genel.
■ Specialist business publisher Informa said that its publishing activities remain resilient and that its events business has not seen any worsening in trading.
■ Tenanted pub group Enterprise Inns posted a sharp fall in profits after a difficult year for the pub trade and said it expected profits to continue declining in the short-term.
■ Real estate giant British Land reported continuing declines in rental income, pre-tax profits and its portfolio valuation in the six months to September 30
■ Interim profits fell at inter-dealer broker ICAP as a tough summer slowed activity across OTC markets while acquisitions affected margins.
■ Estate agent Savills reported strong trading at its UK residential and Asia Pacific businesses but said its European arm continues to face difficult conditions.
■ Contracting firm Balfour Beatty has won a rail contract from the Ministry of Railways of China.
■ Oil explorer Regal Petroleum has been fined £600,000 by the Aim Disciplinary Committee for issuing misleading information over its Kallirachi prospect in Greece four years ago.
■ Trading remains in keeping with expectations at car rental firm Avis Europe, with revenue per day remaining ahead of last year's levels.
■ Car dealer Pendragon said trading for the four months ended 31 October 2009 has been ahead of plan as the government's scrappage incentive scheme boosted sales.
FOR A SUMMARY OF LATEST MOVEMENTS IN EQUITY, COMMODITY AND CURRENCY MARKETS, SEE FT.COM'S MARKETS PAGE
■ Why not become a IC registered user - it's free, secure, takes just a few minutes - and gives you access to comprehensive company financial data, stock broker forecasts, our portfolio tool, share price and article alerts, and the stock screening tool. Register now!
■ Or access all areas with IC Advantage, our premium subscription product. Take a free, no-obligation trial to IC Advantage today.
NEWSPAPER SHARE TIPS (17 NOV 2009):
Full round-up of newspaper share tips (sourced from Sharecast)
PRESS HEADLINES:
Bankers who are not prepared to forgo controversial contracts that flout new rules on bonuses should get out of the mainstream industry, Lord Myners has declared.
The City Minister fired a warning shot ahead of the Queen's Speech tomorrow, which will outline plans to forbid guaranteed bonuses and other pay deals. Lord Myners, in an interview with The Times, said: "People who are not willing to subordinate their own egos to the stability of their companies or the financial system probably shouldn't carry out activities in deposit-taking banks."
Meanwhile, banks will face having chunks of their future profits seized by the state if they do not fund a deposit insurance scheme, the Bank of England's deputy governor has warned. In a veiled threat, Paul Tucker, the man in charge of the Bank's financial stability function, said that the state had a legal right to extract cash off the banking sector if one of their number collapses and its depositors' savings protected, the Telegraph reports.
Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland, the state-backed lenders, are among a raft of large European companies underestimating the size of their pension deficits by a combined €300bn (£268bn). Lloyds' stated pension obligations are €14.2bn shy of the real size of the deficit, while RBS's are €13.3bn behind, according to research from equity research house AlphaValue, the Telegraph reports.
Attorneys representing the estate of Lehman Brothers filed a lawsuit on Monday against Barclays Capital, seeking to claw back as much as $10bn (£5.9bn) that it claims was transferred to the UK bank last year in the frenzied days following Lehman's bankruptcy, the FT reports.
The London-based chief executive of one of Asia's leading banks has launched a caustic attack on the direction of global regulation and warned there will be a "real cost ... borne by the economy" if current regulatory reforms are implemented. Peter Sands, chief executive of Standard Chartered, the emerging markets bank, said in an interview that policymakers were "kidding themselves" if they thought higher capital and liquidity requirements would be absorbed by banks and their shareholders, the FT reports.
The Federal Reserve is monitoring currency markets "closely" and will conduct policy in a way that will "help ensure that the dollar is strong", Ben Bernanke said on Monday in rare comments on the US currency. In remarks apparently aimed at reassuring markets and foreign governments that the central bank is not indifferent to the fate of the US currency, the Fed chairman said "we are attentive to the implications of changes in the value of the dollar," the FT reports.
The battle for Christmas shoppers is hotting up as the deadline for VAT to return to 17.5 per cent approaches. The amount that shoppers spend at Christmas is set to fall by £535m this year, the first drop in two decades, according to Verdict, the retail market research company, the Times reports.
Britain's shopkeepers have joined forces with the Government to urge European Union countries to vote against extending punitive tariffs on leather shoes from Asia at a crucial meeting on Thursday. They have warned that extending the tariffs would "deal a hammer blow" to hard-pressed retailers and damage Europe's trade interests with Asia, the Independent reports.
A member of the Bank of England's rate-setting committee said last night that the economy had emerged from recession in the quarter between July and September, contradicting initial figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Andrew Sentance said that a wide body of evidence "suggests the UK economy has moved on to a recovery track and growth has resumed in the second half of this year," the Times reports.
General Motors, the American car giant driven to bankruptcy by the global recession, will begin paying back bailout money from the US government as early as next month. The company said it lost $1.2bn in the period from July, when it emerged from bankruptcy protection, to the end of September – but it was a figure that delighted investors and prompted some fighting talk from management, the Independent reports.
