The housing market has been going great guns over the last year, judging by results from Berkeley Group (LON:BKG), the house builder.
The company delivered a sparkling set of results for the year to 30 April, despite the prospect – now gone – of Ed Miliband leading a government committed to the introduction of the so-called mansion tax, which would have hit some home-owners in London and the south-east, where Berkeley plies its trade.
The company said it started eight new sites during the reporting period in Wapping, Chiswick, Maidenhead, Isleworth, Islington, Hornsey, Kingston and Bracknell – a mixture of locations that range from the painfully hip to merely painful.
“Berkeley is delivering some 10% of all new homes in London and 10% of the capital's affordable homes across our 74 sites. This creates economic value of £1.4 billion and sustains some 12,000 jobs. In addition, we remain committed to increase site-based apprenticeships and training to help address the skills shortage which our industry faces,” said Berkeley’s chairman, Tony Pidgley.
Back in the mid-to-late seventies when the Boomtown Rats were riding the punk bandwagon and enjoying a few memorable hits, the band’s frontman Bob Geldof was clearly a man with an eye for the main chance, but few would have predicted he would end up as a director on the board of publicly quoted companies.
Sir Bob, who has been helping holographic music show technology firm Grooveme publicise its remarkable technology, is reducing his board room commitments, however, as he is to step down from the board of telly and media production group Ten Alps (LON:TAL).
Geldof co-founded the company in 1999 but is moving on to make way for serial entrepreneur Luke Johnson, who has not taken on a directorship of a company for at least a couple of days now.
The board restructuring coincides with the acquisition of Reef Television, an award-winning producer of media content.
In other media news, nepotism is a difficult word to spell, so it is just as well that there is no trace of it in the appointment of James Murdoch as the new chief executive officer of 21st Century Fox, where he will succeed Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch – the Rupert variety – will stay on as executive co-chairman, sharing duties with another Murdoch – this one of the Lachlan variety.
Any chance of 21st Century Fox doing a remake of the old Hitchock thriller: Dial M for Murdoch
Alternatively, what about a film called Some of our Payments are Missing?
That’s the story at RBS (LON:RBS) and NatWest, where a computer glitch has caused a number of bank transfers to go missing overnight. The news follows hot on the heels of an IT snarl-up over the weekend at the Nationwide Building Society.
Apparently, the increasing popularity of mobile communication devices spells the end of high street branches for banks, but in terms of keeping your money safe, it is a good thing that Apple has not yet devised an iMattress.
There was a mini-takeover frenzy this morning with IT equipment tester Anite (LON:AIE) agreeing to a bid from Dutch firm Keysight, and educational display technology firm Promethean World (LON:PRW) mulling a 40p a share sighting shot from Hong Kong-based NetDragon WebSoft.