Friday morning business bulletin
Last orders loomed for Foster’s brewer Scottish & Newcastle today after it agreed a £7.8bn takeover offer from rivals Heineken and Carlsberg.
The European suitors, who have been pursuing Edinburgh-based S&N since October, plan to carve up the business when the deal is completed.
The move is set to call time on more than 250 years for the brewer, which also makes Kronenbourg 1664 and Newcastle Brown Ale.
S&N's board finally accepted the European duo's fourth offer for the business, worth 800p a share. The offer is more than 50% higher than when speculation began over a possible takeover in March last year. The brewer has previously accused Carlsberg and Heineken of trying to pick up the firm "on the cheap".
The FTSE 100 Index made further gains today as a revival in US and Asian markets continued to lift blue chips.
A US$150bn (£76bn) economic stimulus package and upbeat jobs data boosted Wall Street, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained more than 100 points.
With Hong Kong and Japan tracking the gains overnight, the Footsie was 71 points up at 5949.9 in early trading - above its opening point on Monday before the turmoil struck.
The better economic news helped a host of index heavyweights, with miners Rio Tinto - up 201p to 4720p - and Vedanta Resources, which gained 68p to 1774p, spearheading the surge. Oil major BP cheered 12p to 543p after heavy losses earlier this week, while in the banking sector, Barclays added 15p to 506p.
The hunt was on today for a rogue trader who caused the second biggest bank in France to lose 4.9bn euros (£3.7bn) in one of the biggest banking frauds in history.
Frenchman Jerome Kerviel, 31, has yet to be formally sacked by Societe Generale for what the company says was an elaborate deception by an "irrational" trader.
It is understood that the firm does not currently know the current whereabouts of Mr Kerviel, who was based in its Paris office and confessed to the fraud over the weekend.
The bank said he managed to rack up hefty losses after gambling away billions of pounds on the direction of stock markets in a series of secret transactions. The fraud dwarfs the losses involved in the infamous "rogue trader" case in 1995, which saw Nick Leeson cause the collapse of Barings bank after costing the group £800m.
The pound at 9am was US$1.9831 compared to US$1.9733 at the previous close, while the euro at 9am was £0.7435 compared to £0.7468 at the previous close.
