Bouncing back SHARES in pharmaceuticals company Grifols rose 5.5 per cent to almost €10 on December 16 before eventually settling at €9.71.
Grifols has finally begun to bounce back after refinancing its debt with a €1.3 billion guaranteed bond issue which will fall due in 2007.
The Barcelona-based global leader in blood plasma-derived medicines continues its recovery after Brookfield Corporation dropped takeover plans in late November. The deal fell through because Grifols rejected the Canadian asset management company’s €10.5 per share offer as “significantly undervalued.”
The company saw its shares plummet by 37 per cent since January this year after short-seller Gotham City Research questioned the size of Grifols’ debt and the veracity of its bookkeeping.
Inside story NATIONWIDE, whose £2.8 billion (€3.4 billion) Virgin Money takeover was finalised in October, has injected £650 million (€787.4 million) into Virgin’s Clydesdale Bank division.
At the time of the deal, which created the UK’s second-largest savings and loans group, Virgin Money’s board was accused of selling out for too low a price.
The Mail on Sunday has now revealed that most of this capital infusion was necessary to maintain the bank’s financial strength and bring Clydesdale’s accounting system into line with Nationwide’s “more conservative” approach.
Losing patience BASQUE steel company Sidenor could scrap plans to acquire the 29.9 per cent stake belonging to train manufacturer Talgo’s majority shareholder, Trilantic.
Talking to the EFE news agency on December 15, Sidenor’s chairman Jose Antonio Jainaga said that acquiring the Talgo holding “wasn’t a matter of life or death.”
Sidenor would pay Trilantic €4 per share, putting a value of €150 million on its holding and €500 million on Talgo itself, compared with Hungarian consortium’s €5 per share proposal that was vetoed by Madrid, but would have paid Trilantic €185 million.
“If the shareholder doesn’t want us in Talgo, we’ll step back and stop wasting time and energy,” Jainaga said.
Afloat again BELEAGURED Harland & Wolff (H&W), forever famous for building the doomed Titanic, is nearing a £70 million (€84.8 million) government-backed rescue deal.
This includes job guarantees for H&W’s 1,000 workers, Sky News said.
Ministers announced that following months of negotiations, H&W and its four UK shipyards would be acquired by Spanish shipbuilder Navantia after collapsing into administration last September.
State-owned Navantia will benefit from improved terms on a government contract – described as “uneconomic” – to build three Fleet Solid Support vessels for the Royal Navy.
Government favourite MEINRAD SPENGER, MasOrange chief executive, complained that Telefonica received preferential treatment.
Spain’s government now has a 10 per cent holding in Telefonica, which was privatised in 1997, and the Markets and Competition Authority recently approved a 20 per cent increase in the charges for accessing its cables, towers, duct chambers and ducts.
The escalating cost of using this infrastructure came at a time when Telefonica had 50 per cent profit margin on duct charges, Spenger said.
“More than 17 million households have MasOrange fibre and we want to roll out more, but they are penalising us and that’s not right.”
Carlsberg green light THE UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) approved Carlsberg’s £3.3 billion (€4 billion) takeover of soft drinks maker Britvic.
The CMA decision on December 17 arrived one day before the deadline for the first phase of its investigation which began last October.
Having confirmed the deal, which will be completed on January 16, the regulator said it would not be carrying out an in-depth scrutiny of the Danish company’s takeover of the Britvic, known for Robinsons squash and 7UP labels.
Bare minimum THIRD-QUARTER figures from the National Statistics Institute (INE) showed that each employee now costs a Spanish business-owner €2,205 every month.
This was 4.1 per cent more than during the same period last year, and analysts assessing the Ministry of Labour will take that into account when increasing the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI).
This is calculated at 60 per cent of the average salary and is aimed at maintaining purchasing power.
