Booker Leaves Northern Foods

Northern Foods today parted company with Andrew Booker, its finance director, after only ten months with the group.

The company, which is responsible for Goodfella's pizzas and Fox's biscuits, said: "Andrew will be standing down by mutual agreement."

He will stay on for a further three months until December 31 and will be succeeded by Simon Herrick, the finance director of Kesa Electricals.

Mr Booker was previously European finance director with Gallaher, the cigarette maker that was taken over by Japan Tobacco in a deal worth $19 billion in 2006.

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Can Amazon Be Wal-Mart of the Web?

THE hum of 102 rooftop air conditioners and a chorus of beeping electric carts provide the acoustic backdrop in Amazon.com’s 605,000-square-foot distribution facility on this city’s west side. But the center’s employees can almost always hear Terry Jones.

On a recent summer afternoon, Mr. Jones, an “inbound support associate” making $12 an hour, steered a hand-pushed cart through the packed aisles and shouted his location to everyone in earshot: “Cart coming through. Yup! Watch yourself, please!” Mr. Jones explained that he was just making his time at Amazon “joyful and fun” while complying with the company’s rigorous safety rules.

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RBS 'considering' cash call option

Part-nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland is weighing up a new fundraising to prevent the taxpayer's stake in the ailing bank from rising further, it has been reported.

Chief executive Stephen Hester has begun informal talks with investors over a possible cash call, the Sunday Times said.

Mr Hester is said to be considering the move to pay the £19.5 billion fees due to the Government to take part in a taxpayer-backed insurance scheme for more than £300 billion in toxic assets.

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NBF backs resource stocks in energy-sector upgrade

If you picked up bank stocks when the stock market was at its lowest in March when financials were out of favour, then they’re definitely worth holding on to for their once-in-a-lifetime dividend yields that topped out with Bank of Montreal paying 11.64 per cent per annum. Bet you wish you could turn the clock back on that one!

Since then, share prices of Canada’s banks have soared an average of 105 per cent and while the stocks remain attractive, the average yield of the Big Six has fallen to 4.4 per cent from 9.1 per cent. BMO is still delivering the most at 5.4 per cent. Even so, investment advisers are less positive on bank stocks and financials than they were a couple of months ago.

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State's a Wreck -- Can It Be Fixed?

Three inarguable facts dominate California's system of financing state government:
• It's a mess.
• It's currently a mess in large part due to the deepest and most pervasive global recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
• It's been a mess for much of the past three decades because the combination of an out-of date tax system, reckless spending and fickle voters has made state government extremely vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of the economy.

While there's not much the state's elected leaders can do about the worldwide economic woes, they have tried for decades -- mostly unsuccessfully -- to wrestle with the triple threat of taxes, spending and ballot-box budgeting.

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Automakers bank on ‘careful’ habits

Big cars and trucks are out. Smaller ones that offer more for your dollar are in. And many drivers will hang onto the new cars they buy longer.

We’ve seen some of this before – in the 1970s. But there’s reason to believe that this time, American car-buying habits have changed forever.

Scarred by the worst financial crisis since the 1930s and still leery of high gas prices, people are walking into showrooms intent on spending less. The trend is strongest among baby boomers, who are 44 to 63 years old and make up a quarter of the population, dealers and industry analysts say.

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PDIC eyes premium from sale of UCPB

WITH government-sequestered United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB) returning to profitability in the first half of 2009, the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC) will try to sell its equity interest in the bank at a premium should the Supreme Court rule with finality on the bank ownership in favor of the government.

“Ideally we should be looking at cost recovery. But with the bank now making profits, of course we can get some premium,” PDIC president Jose Nograles told reporters.

In 2003 PDIC extended a P20-billion financial assistance to help rehabilitate UCPB, which suffered from heavy deposit withdrawals when the Supreme Court ruled that the coconut-levy funds used to put up the bank were public money.

Eight billion pesos of the loan from PDIC had been settled already while the balance of P12 billion had been converted into equity in the bank.

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