LOSSES AT CLERYS DOWN €2M IN YEAR BEFORE LIQUIDATION - Losses at the Clerys department store reduced by more than €2 million in its final full year of trading, according to documents filed with the High Court.
This was after consultancy fees of €517,853 were booked in its administrative expenses. Accounts for OCS Operations Ltd, which ran the department store until its closure on June 12th, show it made a loss of €1.1 million in the year to the end of January 2015. This compared with a loss of €3.1 million for an 18-month period ending February 1st, 2014. It is not clear from the accounts to whom the consultancy fees were paid, writes the Irish Times. The accounts also show just under €1.4 million worth of loans from group companies was repaid by OCS Operations in the year to January 2015. OCS Operations and other entities associated with Clerys were put up for sale by Boston-based Gordon Brothers in January this year. These latest accounts were signed off on by the Gordon Brothers directors on June 11th, the day before the business was sold and the store closed in dramatic fashion. Gordon Brothers sold this entity, along with the holding company, OCS Investment Holdings Ltd, and OCS Properties Ltd, which owned the building on O’Connell Street.
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RISING INTEREST RATES POSE A NEW RISK FOR BANKS, BIS REPORT WARNS - Rising interest rates after years of loose monetary policy will pose a fresh risk to banks' ability to absorb losses using capital buffers, the Bank for International Settlements said in its annual report, published yesterday. A prolonged period of ultra-low rates would further weaken the financial sector and squeeze banks' profitability, but a "normalisation" of borrowing costs would reverse the debt-fuelled inflation of asset prices and hit banks' own loss-absorbing equity capital, the BIS said. "Just as falling yields have supported asset valuation gains in recent years, an eventual normalisation would generate losses...Banks' equity capital would shrink." The world's banking sector has made progress in building up capital buffers since the 2008 crisis, which sounded alarm bells over leverage in the financial industry. Big international banks' core capital levels have risen over the past three years while assets adjusted for riskiness have fallen, the BIS said. But the report warned an impending turn in monetary policy underscored the need for extra regulatory safeguards, says the Irish Independent. Global banking regulators earlier this month set out two such possible measures to force banks to set aside more money to cover interest-rate risk.
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COMPANY MOVES TO ITS OWN BEATS - Innovative Dublin company Beats Medical has created an app which turns a smartphone into a medical device used to deliver treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Launched on the market this year, the app works by providing Parkinson’s sufferers with a beat which they use to cue movement and overcome symptoms, says the Irish Examiner. “Our biggest markets now are UK and Ireland but we have users from across the globe, from the US, Australia, Singapore, and Europe,” says chief executive and founder Ciara Clancy who is now fundraising with a view to expanding the business further. In recent weeks the company was named as one of 18 finalists in this year’s Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, an international competition that assists early-stage female entrepreneurs. In April, Beats Medical participated in a two-week Blackbox Connect accelerator programme in Silicon Valley sponsored by Google. Ms Clancy estimates that there are 10 million people worldwide who suffer from Parkinson’s and who could be helped by the Beats Medical app.
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TRADERS TURN CLOCKWATCHERS AS WORLD GAINS EXTRA SECOND - For some traders Tuesday evening could mean a blissful extra moment in bed. For others, it could be a nightmare. At midnight Greenwich Mean Time as June turns into July, another second will be placed into the world’s computer clocks to keep them in synchronisation with the average time the earth rotates around the sun. Yet this quirk has meant weeks of preparations for the world’s exchanges and clearing houses - and will result in a moment of uncertainty, writes the Financial Times. Although the computing industry has been inserting them since the early 1970s, Tuesday’s marks the first time it has been carried out during a trading day in a world where deals can be executed in fractions of seconds. Trades in New York can be conducted from London in less than 80 milliseconds, making the gap potentially very large. “For all exchanges around the world, the time stamp is everything. It’s the same as the Y2K problem - every exchange will have to do something,” said Nick Solinger, head of product and chief marketing officer at Traiana, a post-trade services company. The last insertion in 2012 caused the website for Qantas, the Australian airline, to crash as well as glitches in the servers for Reddit, the news aggregation website, and LinkedIn. The problem was traced to an issue within Red Hat/Linux servers, which are commonly used by the finance industry to host its business.
