BANKING & INSURANCE
£54m in five years: what bank chiefs earned before meltdownThe chief executives of the UK's five leading banks, including three in line for government bailouts, earned £54m among them over the past five years (
Herald). The staggering remuneration figures, detailing the cash and benefits enjoyed by bank directors, came as Chancellor Alistair Darling defined the rules for government bank aid ahead of a meeting of Lloyds TSB shareholders in Glasgow today that will decide on the proposed takeover of HBOS. The figures, calculated by the left-leaning thinktank, the Labour Research Department, show that all the executive directors named in the annual reports of Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and HBOS - banks in which the government will take a £37bn stake - earned a combined £122m in pay and cash bonuses, including more than £64m in bonuses alone. The figure excludes the shares paid out to the directors over the five-year period. The details of the pay of senior executives is taken from annual reports between 2003 and 2007.
Read all today's banking news from scotsman.com ECONOMYScots shoppers cut back on all but essentialsSCOTTISH shoppers are cutting back on spending on everything other than essential items, the Scottish Retail Consortium (SRC) warns today, reporting the largest drop in non-food sales in eight years (
Scotsman). Like-for-like sales in October were just 0.1 per cent higher than last year north of the Border, with higher food prices accounting for the modest growth. Publicising its monthly retail sales monitor, the SRC said last month's minimal growth was little better than September, which was the worst for more than three years. However, Scotland performed better than the UK as a whole, where like-for-like sales slipped 2.2 per cent in October according to last week's figures from the British Retail Consortium. Home-related products such as furniture, flooring and homewares were worst affected as a smaller number of shoppers opted to invest in high-price goods such as sofas or beds – and even fewer were moving house, necessitating the purchase of new furniture.
Havelock 'set up to survive crunch'HEW Balfour, head of listed shop-fiitting heavyweight Havelock Europa, said his experience of the last recession suggested his firm would continue to grow despite facing economic conditions likely to be the worst in the company's history (
Scotsman). Balfour said he was not "despondent", claiming that he was one of a handful of chief executives in Britain that had run the same business since the last recession in the early 1990s. Havelock, which is based in Dalgety Bay and specialises in fitting out shops, banks and classrooms, reported continued growth in revenues in the quarter to 17 November in an interim management statement to the London Stock Exchange yesterday. Balfour told The Scotsman: "I took particular care in the last 15 years to structure a business that would operate more comfortably in tighter conditions than it did last time. "In totality this will be worse – not for Havelock, it lost a lot of money in the last recession. I do not expect to lose money. I expect us to come through this pretty well." Havelock also does "point of sale" posters and signage through its Letchworth and Bristol-based Showcard Print division.
Read all today's economics news from scotsman.comENERGY & UTILITIESEDF plans 'will create thousands of jobs'EDF'S plans for a new generation of nuclear plants in Britain will create thousands of jobs, an investment so large it could reduce the government's need to invest in job creation, the head of British Energy promised yesterday (
Scotsman). The French power giant announced plans to buy British Energy for £12.5 billion in September, promising to build four European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) plants next to existing nuclear plants in England over the next 17 years. And yesterday Bill Coley, the American who has run East Kilbride-based British Energy since 2005, said few posts would be lost in the merger of the largely distinct companies – EDF has a major retail business, and British Energy is a generation and wholesale specialist. He said constructing the new stations would create a "tremendous" number of new jobs. Building of the plants would be a "huge undertaking" said Coley. "It will be a very sizeable construction workforce, well in the thousands. That will create a tremendous number of jobs, not only in the new company but also a tremendous number in the supply chain in the UK."
Read all today's energy and utilities news from scotsman.comINDUSTRYBPI wraps up 50 job lossesBRITISH Polythene Industries (BPI) yesterday became the second Scottish packaging company in two days to announce job cuts, warning demand from the construction industry had fallen by a third (
Scotsman). The Greenock-based firm said it had laid off 50 staff from three UK locations, and expected "to announce further initiatives in the coming weeks to align our capacity with market demand". On Monday, Macfarlane Group revealed it had laid off 50 staff across the UK and warned it was looking at other ways to reduce costs as demand softens. BPI chief executive John Langlands said demand from the construction industry, which accounts for about 15 per cent of group turnover, had fallen by a third in the nine months to 30 September compared with the same period in 2007. He added that the company's outlook for the coming period was not strong.
Read all today's industry news from scotsman.comRETAILNo regrets, say Princes Square's Dutch ownersDavid Smith, UK portfolio director for Dutch property and investment giant Redevco, yesterday said the company had no regrets about buying upmarket Glasgow shopping mall Princes Square in the months before the Scottish retail sector took a nosedive (
Herald). Redevco, one of Europe's largest property com- panies which also owns retail space in Argyle and George streets in Glasgow and on Edinburgh's Princes Street, paid £107m last November in a deal which included the Guildhall office development in Glasgow's Queen Street. In spite of the global banking crisis and the credit crunch that began to emerge in September 2007 with the run on Northern Rock, Scottish consumer spending did not show signs of buckling until July this year. Smith, who is originally from Aberdeen but operates Redevco's UK retail portfolio from London, yesterday told The Herald in a telephone interview: "I suppose we did buy Princes Square at just about the peak of the market, but we also got it well below the asking price." Indeed, Redevco paid £15m less than the £122m selling price on the two properties that were put on the market in February 2007.
Read all today's retail news from scotsman.comScotsman Business ClubGet to the heart of the issues affecting Scottish business at
www.scotsman.com/businessclub. Features include blogs from The Scotsman's formidable team of business writers - including Bill Jamieson, Martin Flanagan, Peter MacMahon and Scott Reid, a diary of forthcoming company announcements and networking events and video interviews with leading business experts covering a wide range of useful topics."
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