Hints and tips:
...including Philip Morris International’s acquisition of the smokeless tobacco company Swedish Match, and the £4bn purchase of UK department store Selfridges by Thai conglomerate Central Group and Austrian group Signa...
...Signa tries to secure urgent funding The crisis engulfing Austrian property group Signa appears to be too hot for even one of the most feared hedge funds, Elliott Management....
...Signa Holding, the central company, recently filed for administration....
...But on Thursday morning, the bank announced Rickenbacher was leaving after it wrote off its entire $700mn exposure to beleaguered Austrian luxury property developer Signa....
...Switzerland’s Julius Baer reported a more than 50 per cent drop in its profits on Thursday after it wrote off SFr606mn ($700mn) from its exposure to Signa, the crisis-hit Austrian property group....
...Job moves Julius Baer’s chief executive Philipp Rickenbacher is leaving the Swiss bank as it prepares to write off $700mn in loans to crisis-hit Austrian property group Signa....
...seeks board seats at oil refiner Phillips 66 (FT) Castore scores £950mn valuation after Raine-led funding round (FT) Farfetch shares plunge despite talk of founder taking it private (FT) René Benko’s Signa...
...Amid New Orleans festivities, rainmakers wonder if the party is over for Delaware Delaware, Inc. may be the enterprise now under the most intense activist threat....
...Austria’s Signa Holding has offered €3bn including debt for Galeria Kaufhof, the German department store chain, to its struggling Canadian owners Hudson’s Bay Company....
...Merck recently acquired Sigma-Aldrich in a $17bn deal, the biggest in its history, and has also in recent years acquired AZ, an Apple supplier and Millipore Corp, a US maker of lab equipment and chemicals...
...Janus did not respond to requests to discuss Mr Gross’s work on Sigma-Aldrich. It has not been a good year for unconstrained bond managers....
...As it happens, Sigma-Aldrich did not acquire Life Technologies as it was outbid....
...The Aldrich plan was quickly incorporated into the new legislative initiative introduced by Senator Glass. Ah, now there was a true banker-statesman! Over to you, Jamie?...
...Until the Signa deal was announced, office property had overtaken retail space this year as the favoured segment for investment, JLL said....
...“What should happen is the prime broker is responsible for the assets that it holds, and the depository is merely a supervisor and that we don’t take any liability,” says Mr Aldrich....
...Clients are going to choose an administrator that will be there for the long haul,” says Mr Aldrich....
...The pressure for this change is coming from investors, according to David Aldrich, head of global investment services at Bank of New York Mellon....
...In the trouser role of Gennaro’s friend Orsini, the fine mezzo Kate Aldrich is on spirited form, Pascoe adding a sexual dimension to the friendship....
...These included the £180m sale of ING Real Estate’s 88 Wood Street to German fund SEB and the £150m acquisition of UBS’s 200,000 sq ft Milton Gate by Signa Deutschland....
...“The pace of change shows no signs of slackening,” says David Aldrich, managing director of the Bank of New York. What drives this pace is a battle for market share and exploitable economies of scale....
...Peter White, vice chairman, and Frances Aldrich Sevilla-Sacasa, president, worked with him at Citigroup’s private bank, and at Bankers Trust....
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