According to a damning report from MPs, businessman Sir Philip Green left BHS on “life support” when he sold the retailer.
Those of us who have attempted to find something worth buying in the store might find that description on the flattering side.
It spent longer on life support than did legendary soul singer Jackie Wilson, of “The Sweetest Feeling” and “Reet Petite” fame, who was in a coma for eight years and four months before he finally died.
The MPs’ report said Green’s failure to resolve the £571mln hole in the firm’s pension scheme was largely responsible for the chain going belly-up under its new owners.
MP Frank Field, who co-chaired the enquiry, called for Green to cough up “at least” £571mln of his own money to make things right.
John McTernan of the Daily Telegraph believes the furore will provide the first real test of new prime minister Theresa May’s pledge to govern in favour of the little people, rather than the rich and the powerful.
McTernan’s guess is that, although she may have been sincere in her wish to “think not of the powerful”, she will not be able to land a glove on Green. It will be (bad) business as usual.
“Now, the MPs have spoken – Green has a ‘moral’ responsibility to fill the deficit. The very word ‘moral’ is a giveaway,” McTernan writes.
“What it means is that parliament is powerless to act. They can do nothing, so in a Rumplestiltskin-style spasm they have lashed out and tied to humiliate and shame Sir Philip Green. How likely is that to work? We have a stand-off – and the fair outcome of secure pensions for BHS pensioners seems further from achieving than ever.”
Perhaps we should have a referendum on whether Green has to pony-up the readies?
Yahoo!
Someone has bought the pioneering, once dominant internet directory Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) for US$4.83bn in cash, and that someone is Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ), which as owner of AOL knows a thing or two about owning and running digital dinosaurs.
Verizon won’t be getting its hands on Yahoo!’s crown jewels, namely the stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, but it will be acquiring a brand that still has a lot of name recognition, even it has become the Preston North End to Google’s Manchester United.
Verizon paid US$4.4bn for AOL – once known as America Online, and a giant from the dial-up internet access days – and wants to merge it with Yahoo! so it can compete more successfully with Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) for a piece of the digital advertising pie.
Viva Lost Wages
Having jettisoned its chief executive, James Henderson, last week, bookie William Hill PLC (LON:WMH) may be about to be subsumed into a larger group comprising online gaming specialist 888 Holdings PLC (LON:888) and old-school casino and bingo halls operator The Rang Group PLC (LON:RNK).
The bookie confirmed that it had received “a highly preliminary approach” over the weekend from 888 and Rank regarding a potential combination of the three companies.
Bookies are going odds-on that the brand names will be retained as operating units but the holding companies will be saddled with some meaningless corporate name, such as VivaLostWages.
A Hot Maden and a Michelmersh Brick
At the smaller end of the market, investors have justifiably been pounding the refresh button on their web browser hoping for more news of Mariana Resources Limited’s (LON:MARL) updated mineral resource estimate for is Hot Maden project in eastern Turkey.
Those investors are not alone. Proactive Investors has been trying to grab chief executive Glen Parsons for an interview but as he is presently in Australia, we fear he may already be tucked up in bed.
The half-year update from Michelmersh Brick Holdings Plc (LON:MBH) is another that has got the small-cap focused stock market news sites buzzing.
The specialist brick manufacturer put in what called a “good performance in a flat market”, with earnings per share up 4% on flat sales.
The group ended the reporting period well ahead of its intake target with a forward order commitment over 47 million bricks.