The season of big pharmaceutical mergers may not be over, if tittle-tattle on Twitter is to be believed.
Open Outcrier tweets that there is “vague takeover chatter” concerning a takeover of drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline (LON:GSK) by healthcare behemoth Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ).
While Facebook is basking in the glory of a scintillating set of results released last night, advertising giant Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is getting in a spot of bother over its tax policies in Europe.
The company has been very adroit in reducing its tax liabilities and while it has done nothing illegal, a number of governments have been looking at the stonking (it's a British slang term; look it up on DuckDuckGo.com) amount of money the company earns and the surprisingly small amount of tax it pays.
Earlier this week it signed a so-called sweetheart deal with the UK tax authorities to pay £130mln of taxes that, arguably, it was not obliged to cough up, reflecting a change in policy to pay tax based on revenue from UK-based advertisers.
In 2012, Google reportedly paid £11.6mln to Her Majesty's Treasury, despite generating £3.4bn of business in the UK, and if it thought shelling out £130mln would get critics off its back, it was apparently wrong, with Britain's law-makers set to call in Google's executives to subject them to a grilling on the settlement.
That assumes they bother to turn up. The UK parliament once summoned the boss of Kraft, Irene Rosenfeld, to explain why it had apparently broken a pledge shortly after it had taken over one of Britain's best-loved companies, Cadbury, but with the Cadbury deal done and dusted she felt no further need to sweet-talk Britain's authorities.
What's hot and what's not
Civeo Corporation (NYSE:CVEO), up 24.1%. Being a support services firm addressing the natural resources sector is probably not the best market to be in right now, but accommodations provider Civeo is doing all right today after announcing C$41mln of contracts from Canadian oil sands customers.
Global Partners (NYSE:GLP), down 29.6%. The dividend has been cut to 46.25 cents, which implies an annual pay-out of US$1.85 per common unit, down just over a third from the preceding quarter's pay-out. The board said the cut reflects “the severe headwinds sin the crude oil market”.