OWNERS SELL 30% OF BALMORAL TO McCANNS - Japanese group Sumitomo has sold its 30% stake in property company Balmoral International Land Holdings, an investment it inherited last year as part of its takeover of Fyffes.
A spokesman for Balmoral confirmed to The Irish Times that a vehicle linked to the company's chairman, Carl McCann and his brother, David, has acquired the stake. The entity is named in Balmoral’s latest annual report as Huntroyde. The transaction, which took place at the end of August 2017, means that members of the McCann family either directly own shares or are linked to companies that have a combined holding of more than 55% of Balmoral’s shares. Fyffes, synonymous with the McCann family, spun off and listed its property portfolio in 2006 on the junior Dublin and London stock markets as a company called Blackrock International Land. It was subsequently renamed Balmoral in 2010 and delisted from the stock market a year later following a slump in its share price during the property downturn. Fyffes and its former sister company, Total Produce, accounted for almost a third of Balmoral’s €8.4 million rent roll last year.
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AN POST SEES BOOST TO MARKETING MAIL DESPITE GDPR RULES - An Post is experiencing a boost to its direct mailing business ahead of the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The EU-wide regime, which comes into effect this coming Friday, updates and overhauls European data protection law, and all companies that process the data of EU residents are obliged to comply with the new requirements. An Post commercial director Fiona Heffernan said direct mail, which involves sending marketing materials directly to consumers, is worth around €50m to it. "We are seeing signs that it is growing with GDPR," she told the Irish Independent. Last week, Britain's Royal Mail warned the GDPR could reduce marketing mail. Shares in the former state-owned monopoly, which was privatised in 2013 and floated on the London Stock Exchange, were sharply hit after the warning. But Ms Heffernan said An Post does not expect to experience the same decline. "The direct mail industry in the UK has a 20-year start on Ireland, and it is used differently in the UK then it is over here," Ms Heffernan said. She said so-called cold mailing - businesses mailing people they have not previously dealt with in order to attract new customers - is less commonplace in Ireland. This practice, she said, is likely to face more difficulty because of the GDPR.
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TIME TO ACT ON EMPLOYMENT LOOPHOLES - Employers' representative body Ibec has warned tough employment regulations could hinder the growth of "new economy" jobs by increasing red tape.
Ibec's top employment lawyer, Rhona Murphy, has been warning of "a squeeze on employer flexibility", one that is being applied in Leinster House, and from Brussels. She is concerned at the way private members’ bills have been gaining traction during the current Dáil, arguing that many of these proposals are totally unrealistic, says the Irish Examiner. Of particular interest to her is the Competition (Amendment) Act, 2017 which seeks to crack down on the phenomenon of bogus self-employment, creating two new categories: the ‘false’ self employed worker, and the ‘fully dependent’ self-employed worker. Also in this space is the Protection of Employment (Measures to counter False Self Employment ) Bill 2018. The employers’ representative points also to proposed legislation dealing with the use of zero hours and low hours contracts contained in the Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2017.
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BIG BANKS BOOST BREXIT BUDGETS - Big banks are increasing their budgets for dealing with Brexit, as they stick to a March 2019 deadline to transfer parts of their businesses from London despite the 21-month transition deal struck between the UK and EU earlier this year.
Senior executives at three large lenders told the Financial Times their organisations now expected to spend more than £100m on plans to reorganise their businesses after Britain's departure from the EU. Two said the costs, which covered everything from consultants’ fees to planning teams’ salaries and technology, had risen because of prolonged uncertainty about how Brexit will pan out. Consultants said they had seen rises across several banks and that it was "not unusual" for big banks to have budgeted £100m-£200m for Brexit costs this year, in addition to the £10m-£30m they had already spent since the June 2016 vote to take the UK out of the EU. The news comes after a survey from EY showed that 65% of financial services businesses said a political agreement on a Brexit transition had not changed their Brexit planning timelines. Just 4% of the 181 financial services groups polled by the consultancy firm said they would work towards a December 2020 deadline, when the agreed transition expires, rather than March 2019, when Britain leaves the EU and the transition begins.
