Take the money and run: how big corporates get fleeced

The admission by Foster's chairman David Crawford that the company's wine acquisitions had failed is a timely reminder that most big acquisitions do not work for shareholders.

Commander bet the house, and lost

COMMANDER Communications' lenders have called in the corporate paramedics in an attempt to revive what only two years ago was Australia's fourth biggest telecom.

Unlisted Babcock fund splurges on gas

An unlisted fund managed by Babcock & Brown willbuy two US gas distribution companies from Dominion Resources for $US910 million ($A946.44 million).

RBS to unveil sale of Angel Trains and £10 billion rights issue

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) will announce the £3.5 billion sale of Angel Trains and a £10 billion-plus rights issue tomorrow. RBS board members and the bankers advising them were in talks yesterday to finalise the bank’s fund-raising plans. They are expected to be approved by a full board meeting today. The bank plans to announce that the long-awaited sale of Angel Trains has been completed. It is believed that the rolling stock leasing company has been sold to a consortium led by the investment firm Babcock & Brown and backed by Deutsche Bank. RBS will also signal that it is open to offers for the insurance brands Direct Line and Churchill by confirming that it is conducting a “strategic review” of these business. They are thought to carry a price tag of between £4 billion and £5 billion. AIG, Allianz, AXA and Generali have been mentioned as possible bidders for the business. The sale of Angel Trains would help to alleviate some of the pressure on the RBS chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, who said recently that the bank had no need to raise equity capital. RBS has yet to fix the price of the rights issue, which will be at a substantial discount to the current share price. RBS, which owns NatWest, is also set to announce a further writedown of between £5 billion and £7 billion. The figure has yet to be agreed because management want this to be the last time it is forced to mark down the value of assets. The bank has already announced writedowns of about £1.7 billion on the value of mortgage-backed securities, loans to private equity groups and securities guaranteed by cash-strapped bond insurers. A source close to RBS said that the planned rights issue will raise “closer to £10 billion” than the £12 billion that was the top of the range that some analysts had been expecting. Although both Churchill and Direct Line are performing well, insurance has become less central to RBS’s business as it concentrates more on core banking activities after the acquisition of ABN Amro last year. Snatching the Dutch bank from Barclays, the rival bidder, has stretched RBS’s balance sheet. It paid about €71 billion (£56.2 billion), with Banco Santander and Fortis, for ABN Amro, a price that some analysts believe was too high. There will be a full board meeting today, conducted over the telephone, to confirm the proposals, which will be announced to the stock exchange tomorrow. The bank’s annual meeting in Edinburgh will take place on Wednesday as planned. Although Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, will back Sir Fred, there are set to be changes to the board. The bank aims to recruit new nonexecutive directors to show that its corporate governance is sound. RBS cut 200 staff in its global banking and markets business this month, mostly in London. UBS has joined Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in underwriting the rights issue. Shares in RBS, which have slipped 14 per cent since the start of 2008, were volatile on Friday but ended up 18p, or 4.9 per cent, at 384p after news of the rights issue, the largest in British history, emerged. If the bank goes ahead with the rights issue, it could prompt other British banks to follow suit. Analysts believe that Barclays and HBOS are the most likely to try to bolster their balance sheets through a rights issue. The banks should receive a fillip today as Alistair Darling is set to announce a £50 billion package to help to ease bank liquidity worries and restart interbank lending. The Bank of England is expected to swap £50 billion of government bonds for lenders’ assets in an attempt to ease the crisis in the mortgage market, which has seen lenders drop thousands of products in the past year.

UK bank RBS posts giant half-year loss

Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC on Friday reported a half-year loss of 802 million pounds ($1.5 billion), forced deep into the red by 5.9 billion pounds ($11.4 billion) in write-downs as the U.S. subprime credit crisis exacted more pain fully a year after it began.

UK bank RBS posts giant half-year loss (AP)

AP - Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC on Friday reported a half-year loss of 802 million pounds (US$1.5 billion), forced deep into the red by 5.9 billion pounds (US$11.4 billion) in write-downs as the U.S. subprime credit crisis exacted more pain fully a year after it began.