Today in the press

HUGHES & HUGHES WINS €70m HEATHROW CONTRACT - Bookseller Hughes & Hughes has landed a €70m contract to operate as the exclusive bookseller for Terminal 5 at London's Heathrow Airport, which will handle 30 million passengers a year, reports the Irish Times. The contract will generate sales for the book chain of €14m a year. The terminal, one of the largest building projects in Europe, will open in 2008, but the fit out of the retail outlets begins next spring. Several British booksellers had also been chasing the contract. Derek Hughes, executive chairman of the chain, said that the contract win was great news for the company, but also for Irish retailers generally. He noted that many British retailers had established strong positions in Ireland in recent years, so it was gratifying to see the position reversed. The winning of the contract is likely to provide a significant financial boost for Hughes & Hughes. The company posted turnover of €24.4m in the year to the end of February 2005 and recorded pre-tax profits of almost €1m.

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CLARENDON SPLASHES OUT $170m ON BOSTON SKYSCRAPER - Clarendon Properties, the investment vehicle of developers Paddy McKillen and Tony Leonard, has splashed out $170m (€132m) on a 21-storey skyscraper in Boston, writes the Irish Independent. Boston Properties Inc bought the building jointly with the New York Common Retirement Fund for $97m (€76.5m) in 2000. It has spent around $11m (€8.7m) renovating the 350,000 sq ft building called 265 Franklin Street. Around 20 bids were submitted for the building which Clarendon secured with a $485 per sq ft bid, significantly lower than similar buildings in Europe. The building is almost fully occupied with 29 different tenants, including Eastern Bank Corp and legal firm McCarter & English LLP.

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NEWS CORP PLANS MYSPACE IN CHINA - Rupert Murdoch said on Tuesday that his wife, Wendy Deng, was working with senior executives to help bring the company's popular MySpace social networking site to China, says the Financial Times. 'We have to make MySpace a very Chinese site,' Mr Murdoch said at a media conference organised by Goldman Sachs. 'I have sent my wife across there because she understands the language.' Mr Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp, bought MySpace last year as part of his strategy for the digital age. MySpace has become one of the most popular sites on the internet because of the ease with which people can communicate and share text, pictures and video.

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UK SHARES PLUNGE HITS NUCLEAR SELL-OFF - Fresh doubts were cast over the British Government's plans to raise some £3 billion from the sale of shares in British Energy yesterday after the nuclear power producer warned that output this year would be further hit by cracks in some of its reactors, reports the London Independent. The warning sent British Energy shares 8% lower, wiping nearly £500m from the value of the Government's 65% holding in the company. Since late July, when the Trade and Industry Secretary, Alistair Darling, confirmed that the Government intended to proceed with the disposal of part of its stake through a public offer, British Energy shares have fallen by 16%. Although ministers have never given any details about the timing or scale of the share sale, it is thought that the Government planned to launch the offer late this year and to sell between 20-30% of British Energy, raising between £2 billion and £3 billion.