SETANTA DEEP IN EXTRA TIME AND LOOKING FOR A LATE GOAL - Pay per view sports broadcaster Setanta held an emergency board meeting yesterday amidst growing concern that it can not pay its bills. The company is not talking, nor is its major shareholder Balderton Capital. The company's immediate problem is a £3m sterling payment outstanding to the Scottish Premier League while the prospect of a £40m payment to the English Premier League looms later this month. Reports suggest that accountants Deloitte are lined up as administrators to the company.
Irish Times Business Affairs Correspondent Ciaran Hancock says the administrators could be called in as early as Thursday or Friday unless a rescue package can be agreed. He says such a package has been worked on for weeks, and it looks highly unlikely that anything will be achieved this week. Setanta's woes began in February when it lost out on one of its two packages for the English Premier league, which left it with only 23 live games from August 2010 onwards. Ciaran Hancock says this made it very difficult for its backers to refinance the company, which is heavily indebted and losing a lot of money every year. He says the firm's business plan was built around a model that involved 46 live league matches.
The Irish end of the business has a separate shareholder structure with music promoter Denis Desmond owning 20% of the business and the other 80% held by the shareholders who own Setanta Sports Holdings, the parent company. He says the Irish business, and possibly the international operations in the US and Australia, may be ringfenced in some way and spun out in some way. But he points out this might be wishful thinking as some of the rights are held by the parent company. He says the company is deep in extra time and it badly needs to find a goal somewhere.
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NORKOM REVENUES RISE AS FIRM LOOKS EAST - Irish listed Norkom, which specialises in financial crime and compliance software, has reported a slight increase in pre-tax profits for the year ending March 2009. Pre-tax profits rose to €4.905m from €4.879m the same time the previous year while revenues rose by 17% to €48m from €41m.
Norkom's CEO Paul Kerley says the firm has spent the last couple of years diversifying its business right across the globe, so as one market declined the demand in another could be tapped into. He says this strategy has helped it maintain its growth pattern. He says that while the spend by banks on software has collapsed, the nature of the business Norkom is in is non-discretionary. He says the regulatory demands make banks spend every year on multi-year programmes. On top of that, he says that criminal activity increasing by about 40% across most streams of fraud.
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MORNING BRIEFS - Anglo Irish Bank chairman Donal O'Connor will appear before an Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service later today to explain some of the happenings at the scandal-ridden banks.
*** On the currency markets, the euro is worth $1.3885 and 86.5 pence sterling.
