PETROCELTIC'S O'CATHAIN SEES OFF SHAREHOLDER CHALLENGE AT EGM - Brian O'Cathain saw off a shareholder challenge and retained his job as chief executive of Petroceltic following a lively extraordinary general meeting (EGM) in Dublin yesterday, writes the Irish Independent.
But Angelo Moskov, who heads up Petroceltic's biggest shareholder and who called for the ballot to oust the chief executive, said last night that he will come back to shareholders with new proposals aimed at furthering his opposition to the current management and strategy. "There may be more changes that need to be made to the board, and that may mean more EGMs," he said yesterday. Just over 61% of shares voted against a motion proposed by Mr Moskov's Worldview Capital that would have unseated the head of the Irish oil and gas company, versus 39% of votes in favour, at the meeting. The EGM and litigation that Worldview has initiated against Petroceltic were a "last resort", Mr Moskov said. Speaking after the ballots had been counted, Brian O'Cathain said he was "pleased to have received the support of shareholders". "Hopefully that is the end of this," he said. The ballot saw around 90% of the 1,365 stock holders who voted come down in favour of the incumbent management, the company said.
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HSBC REVELATIONS LEAD TO REVENUE INVESTIGATIONS OF 13 IRISH PEOPLE - Switzerland refused a request for assistance to help bring prosecutions here on the basis of the leaked HSBC Geneva banking files, according to the Irish Revenue Commissioners. Revenue chairman Niall Cody has also told the Dáil Committee of Public Accounts that 13 people are the subject of ongoing investigations arising from the Swiss data, with the amount in their accounts involving a maximum of $14.83 million. Mr Cody, in a letter to the committee seen by The Irish Times, said the Revenue successfully sought the HSBC files from the French authorities in 2010, having read about their existence in the media. The total deposits associated with Ireland were greater than $6 billion, the files indicated. The files were stolen from HSBC Geneva by a former employee, Herve Falciani, and eventually came into the possession of Le Monde. More recently, reports based on the data have been published by the Irish Times and other media partners of the US-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
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MORTGAGE RULES 'WILL NOT AFFECT PRICES' - The Central Bank’s new deposit and loan-to-income rules will not affect house prices or supply when demand is based on fundamentals, but they will have a significant impact on speculative demand, according to Central Bank economist Lars Frisell says the Irish Examiner. “If the housing market has become speculative, where credit and house prices grow partly based on expectations of further house price increases, the rules will have a significant effect. The reason is that, at that stage, buyers’ incomes will neither pass the loan-to-income rule, nor will they support sufficient savings to accumulate future deposits,” said Mr Frisell, speaking at the Irish Economy conference in Dublin yesterday. “Hence, the irrational expectation of ever-increasing prices is thwarted, and credit and house price growth will revert to a sustainable path. Hence, macroprudential regulation, by putting prudent norms in the credit market on a legislative footing, can counteract financial bubbles without significant side effects in normal times.” Last October, the Central Bank announced that it planned to introduce deposit and income caps for mortgage lending in order to prevent another property bubble from forming.
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OXFORD HOUSES LESS AFFORDABLE THAN LONDON - Oxford is the most unaffordable place to live in Britain, outstripping London, according to an analysis of housing market data and local wages, writes the Financial Times. Average house prices in the city are 16.1 times the local average annual income, research by Danny Dorling, an Oxford university professor, has found, compared with 15.7 times in London. The average cost of a house in Oxford in 2014 was £426,720 according to the research, with the city’s workers earning on average £26,500 a year. In London the average house price was £501,520 and the average wage £31,950 a year. Other areas with house price to income ratios of more than 10 included Cambridge, Brighton, Milton Keynes and Reading. The figures are revealed in a new edition of Mr Dorling’s book All That Is Solid, an assessment of Britain’s housing crisis, which argues that the current market is unsustainable. “Compared with earlier decades, house prices across the UK are extremely high when compared with the average take-home pay,” Mr Dorling said. “‘Fewer and fewer people are able to get a mortgage.” Oxford’s house prices have been driven up by the large number of London commuters who have moved out of the capital in search of cheaper housing, combined with restrictive planning laws protecting the greenbelt around the city from housing development, Mr Dorling said.
