News with Tags "reuters"

(Reuters) – Chesapeake Energy Corp sought to calm Wall Street worries about its financial position, telling investors on Monday it was confident it would complete assets sales to plug a funding gap estimated at $ 10 billion (6 billion pounds) this year.

“We will get our assets sales done,” Chief Executive Aubrey McClendon told a conference call with analysts and investors.

Late Friday, Chesapeake said it had received a new $ 3 billion loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Jefferies Group Inc to pay down an existing debt facility.

The loan is designed to give it breathing room to complete the planned sales of properties in West Texas’ Permian Basin and the Mississippi Lime field in northern Oklahoman and southern Kansas, which are part of a slate of sales the company says will raise $ 9.5 billion to $ 11 billion this year.

Chesapeake would not confirm activist investor Carl Icahn would announce he had taken a stake in the company, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Icahn bought a stake in Chesapeake in late 2010, but sold it a few months after the company raised nearly $ 5 billion through an asset sale, which pushed the shares sharply higher at the time.

“We have seen that (report) and wouldn’t be surprise if Carl became a large shareholder,” McClendon said. “He made, I think over $ 500 million, and he called me to thank me” after the deal.

Icahn was not immediately available to comment on the report.

Shares in Chesapeake had slumped 14 percent on Friday after the company issued its delayed quarterly regulatory filing, and said it could put off some asset sales to preserve income needed to comply with debt obligations.

Chesapeake has been caught in a corporate governance controversy since Reuters reported last month that McClendon had mortgaged his personal stakes in the company’s oil and gas wells to companies that had lent money to the company.

Shares in Chesapeake were up 3.6 percent to $ 15.35 per share in early trading, bringing their loss so far this year to 31 percent.

(Reporting By Anna Driver in Houston, Matt Daily in New York and Svea Herbst in Boston, Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Jeffrey Benkoe)

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – While financial markets may be worried about last week’s data showing a broad slowing down of China‘s economy, the data is not very worrying from a credit or rating perspective, Fitch Ratings said on Monday.

“The data flow is not news from a credit sense,” said Andrew Colquhoun, senior director for Fitch Ratings in Asia.

He said he does not expect a hard landing in China’s economy and the weakening seen was part of a deliberate policy-driven slowdown.

Last week’s data showed China’s economy is weakening broadly. Industrial production growth slowed sharply in April and fixed asset investment – a key growth driver – hit its lowest level in nearly a decade. Loan growth has also been weak.

(Reporting by Vidya Ranganathan; Editing by Richard Borsuk)

LONDON (Reuters) – Demand for the world’s priciest houses is likely to cool this year after two years of strong growth, as concerns over Europe’s debt crisis, the health of the global economy and governments price cooling measures in Asia dissuade buyers, research showed.

Data from property consultancy Knight Frank showed the average price of luxury homes across 23 key world cities fell for the first time since 2009 by 0.4 percent in the first quarter of 2012, reflecting slowing demand.

This was also sharply down from the same period in 2011, during which global luxury house prices had risen 6.6 percent, Knight Frank said.

“There’s an element of nervousness among investors as to where the economy is going. In the last two-to-three years you’ve seen quite a big rebound in repricing, and the slowdown really comes down to the euro zone crisis and a much slower global economic recovery than was anticipated,” Knight Frank’s Head of Residential Research, Liam Bailey told Reuters.

Europe’s debt crisis hit a new hurdle last week after the Greek public rejected the bailout at voting polls, while economists are predicting another year of slow growth for the U.S. In Asia, the Chinese and Singaporean governments have introduced measures to cool their red-hot property markets.

Knight Frank said the fall in luxury house prices in the first three months of the year was led by Tel Aviv, where prices fell 6.6 percent, and Kiev, where values slid 6.4 percent.

Luxury home values in the U.S. cities of Manhattan, New York and Miami fell 4.3 percent and 1.9 percent respectively in the first quarter, reversing a trend of double digit growth registered in the past year.

Knight Frank said that there was however still strong safe haven demand from international investors for cities like London and Singapore, where prices rose 2.7 percent and 1.9 percent respectively despite new property taxes introduced over the period.

Global luxury house prices surged in the past two years as safe haven-seeking foreign millionaires snapped up houses in New York, Paris and London, while strong economic growth and a rising middle class fuelled local demand for luxury homes in emerging cities like Nairobi and Jakarta.

(Reporting by Brenda Goh; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)

ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s social fabric is being torn by recession and tensions are growing among its citizens, Prime Minister Mario Monti said on Sunday.

Speaking to a group of students in the central Italian town of Arezzo, Monti urged Italians to stick together and “not give up” in the face of a shrinking economy and rising unemployment.

Monti’s technocrat government has imposed painful austerity measures since taking office last year, and in recent days ministers have responded to calls from politicians and the media to show more compassion for the plight of ordinary Italians.

“The country is now marked by profound social tensions,” Monti said. “It’s inevitable that social unease is increasing, that job insecurity fuels a sense of suffering, that there are serious signs of tears in social cohesion.”

A wave of highly publicized suicides in the last few weeks, especially among debt-stricken entrepreneurs, has highlighted the human cost of the crisis.

The public tax collection agency, Equitalia, has been the target of a string of letter bomb and petrol bomb attacks [ID:nnL5E8GD0J8], taking the brunt of citizens anger in the face of a credit squeeze and 24 billion euros of tax hikes this year.

Monti said the government was trying to ensure that sacrifices are shared fairly and warned that the economic crisis could become a “cultural” one if Italians failed to show tolerance and solidarity towards one another.

On Thursday Industry Minister Corrado Passera also said he was increasingly concerned by threats to social cohesion posed by the recession.

Monti’s popularity has fallen sharply this year and the parties supporting him in parliament have become increasingly critical.

His approval rating plunged six percentage points in a week to 38 percent, a poll by the SWG agency published on Friday showed. That compares with a high of 71 percent in November, just after he took office.

(Reporting By Gavin Jones Editing by Maria Golovnina)

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) – Kolkata‘s red-brick secretariat was built more than 200 years ago for Britain’s East India Company, which used trade in opium, cloth and tea to colonize the subcontinent. Distrust of foreign merchants lingers still.

For the past year, the sprawling building has been occupied by Mamata Banerjee, the diminutive chief minister of West Bengal state who is perhaps the largest obstacle to economic reforms that would allow 21st-century traders free access to India‘s consumer markets.

To supporters who affectionately call her “Didi”, or “Big Sister”, Banerjee is a hero who ended more than three decades of communist rule in West Bengal. They say she shelters farmers and shopkeepers from the harsh winds of globalization, while guiding West Bengal towards its rightful place as an economic and cultural powerhouse and India’s gateway to Southeast Asia.

But after a series of erratic moves, including the arrest of an academic who forwarded a joke email about her to his friends, critics see her as an autocrat in the making. Weekly magazine India Today branded her the “Queen of Democrazy”.

Banerjee’s widely ridiculed antics and disappointment with her administration in West Bengal could hasten the end of her honeymoon with the voters.

She is also dependent on the central government to bail West Bengal out of a debt crisis. Together, those factors offer Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a chance to out-maneuver someone who, despite being a coalition ally, has stood doggedly in the way of much-needed economic reform.

In the past year, India‘s stellar economic growth has slowed and its current account and budget deficits have ballooned. But the central government’s attempts to introduce policies it says would remedy the crisis have been blocked by the very coalition allies it relies on for survival, chief among them Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress party.

“She’s very much on the back foot because of her behavior,” said Bengali political analyst Amulya Ganguli, adding a change may now be “in the offing”.

“There are signs of mellowing. Perhaps she realizes she has to act responsibly and not say no to everything.”

A weakened Banerjee could make it easier for Singh’s government, whose popularity has sagged amid corruption scandals and high inflation, to push through reform.

SLUMS AND iPADS

Despite modest beginnings as a poor teacher’s daughter, Banerjee was named in April one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Last week she was visited by Hillary Clinton, who praised her political achievements after discussing potential U.S. investment in Indian ports.

Talking to Reuters in the same sparse room where she received Clinton, Banerjee however gave cold comfort to U.S. merchants who may have thought a visit from the secretary of state would soften her opposition to foreign supermarkets such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. operating in India.

“Never,” Banerjee said emphatically. She said she welcomed private investment to create jobs in areas such as tourism and industrial projects, even for hospitals, but would always oppose policies that destroy jobs for farmers and small retailers.

“There are some areas I cannot go,” she said, clad in a white saree. “I cannot tell the people you just go from your work, you must be jobless because of this.”

She said she would remain opposed to raising the price of heavily subsidized fuel and rail fares. That is bad news for prime minister Singh, whose failure to rein in the deficits and reverse the slowdown has tarnished his reputation as the architect of reforms that transformed India’s slow-coach economy 20 years ago.

“They talk about price rises only for the common people, you have to nurture other options also, you need to look at other ways out, how you can develop business, how you can find more funds,” said Banerjee, whose 19 lawmakers give Singh’s Congress party a majority in parliament.

Unmarried and still living in her tin-roofed family house in a Kolkata slum, Banerjee is facing her own financial crisis in West Bengal’s state government, which could give Singh more leverage on his stalled reform agenda.

Saddled with India’s highest state debt of nearly $ 40 billion – mostly inherited from her communist predecessors who had ruled from 1977 until elections last year – Banerjee is struggling to pay teachers’ salaries and is seeking a three-year moratorium from the central government.

Although she proudly brandishes her iPad, Banerjee is drawn to the frugal tradition of Indian independence hero Mahatma Gandhi. She says she takes no government salary, or perks such as a car and residence.

Such personal austerity has not stopped her hiring some 90,000 new teachers and police, despite the state’s debts. The cost has raised eyebrows but her finance minister, Amit Mitra, said it was nominal because of low wages.

Mitra, a harried-looking former head of India’s premier industry chamber, FICCI, said the state’s tax take was up 20 percent last year thanks mainly to enforcement.

PAST GLORY

Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, was Britain’s beachhead in India and flourished as an intellectual and industrial capital long after the colonialists were expelled. One of the world’s richest cities in the 19th century, Kolkata today is more reminiscent of Cuba’s Havana with its faded tropical grandeur and 1950s-style taxis.

“We want to restore the past glory of this state,” said Banerjee, who has promised to make the city as modern as London and has invited companies to help, including to build a ‘Kolkata Eye’ to rival the British capital’s giant ferris wheel.

Projects to paint city bridges and buildings blue and install thousands of ornamental street lights Banerjee designed herself to boost civic pride have been pilloried in the media but officials say they are cost effective.

New flyovers to ease congested streets, an airport terminal and the mushrooming of middle-class apartments and office buildings are signs that change is on the way.

Overtures to private investment began before Banerjee took office, and many have been disappointed that she has not done more to improve the investment climate in West Bengal.

BLACK AND BLUE

Devoted to Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel literature prize winner, Banerjee has her own creative leanings as a painter and poet.

But critics point to a darker side of someone who does not appear to tolerate dissent. In a sign of her clout, she recently forced the prime minister to fire his railway minister, one of her own party members, after he announced in parliament that rail fares would go up.

“When I announced the increase in fares, everyone thumped the desk,” the former minister, Dinesh Trivedi, said from his New Delhi residence. “And suddenly, I was asked to go.”

The fare rise was supported by unions and economists as necessary to help pay for the modernization of a railway network whose overcrowded trains and creaking infrastructure are a major drag on economic growth.

Then in April, 52-year-old chemistry professor Ambikesh Mahapatra forwarded an email doing the rounds that ridiculed Banerjee’s treatment of Trivedi. Police detained him for what Banerjee called ‘cyber crimes’, but not before a group of about two dozen people confronted him and beat him up.

“I didn’t realize that I was committing some kind of crime,” Mahapatra told Reuters. “There is a sense of fear in my mind. Especially because the government seems so unapologetic.”

Mahapatra’s treatment sparked an outcry. Banerjee, once hospitalized for months after Communist thugs punched her to the ground, defeated the leftists partly by railing against the culture of political violence in West Bengal.

Her critics now wonder whether life is any different.

“White and blue for the bridges, black and blue for the protesters,” said Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

“That appears to be her policy at this moment … She doesn’t have any tolerance for even an iota of dissent.” Such behavior has alienated the educated middle classes who cheered her defeat of the left, Bhattacharyya said.

Banerjee was visibly annoyed by the charge she was autocratic, saying the campaign against her was orchestrated by the communists she ousted and maintaining that violence has dropped sharply since she took office.

Until now, Anand Sharma, the minister who drove the plan to open up India’s retail sector, has seen his ambition thwarted. But change might be coming.

“With this scientist arrest, she is losing sheen as a dragon slayer,” one very senior government adviser said on condition of anonymity. “Perhaps that gives Anand a little more room, we’ll see.”

(Additional reporting by Annie Banerji and Satarupa Bhattacharjya; Editing by John Chalmers and Paul Tait)

(Reuters) – Cosmetics company Avon Products Inc is cooperating with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was reported on Friday to be looking into trading activity before fragrance maker Coty Inc‘s $ 10 billion offer to buy Avon.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the SEC sent a letter to Avon on April 2, the day Coty made its offer public, asking for telephone records and other information.

In the letter, reviewed by the newspaper, the SEC said it “is examining trading in the securities of Avon Products Inc ahead of today’s announcement that Coty Inc has submitted a non-binding proposal to acquire Avon.”

There was no immediate comment from the SEC. An Avon spokeswoman told Reuters the company is cooperating in the matter but declined to comment further.

A Coty spokesman confirmed to the Journal that the privately-held company received a similar letter and said Coty is cooperating fully with the investigation.

The newspaper said the letter did not accuse Avon of any wrongdoing, and it wasn’t immediately clear what caught the SEC’s attention.

Avon’s shares rose about 7 percent between March 7, when Coty first presented its offer in a letter to Avon’s board, and on April 2, when Coty made its offer public.

The shares had been trending higher since late 2011, when Avon said it would replace Andrea Jung, its long-running chief executive. On April 2, Avon’s shares jumped 17 percent to $ 22.70. On Friday, Avon shares closed down 3.3 percent at $ 20.19 on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Steve James in New York; editing by Andre Grenon)

FINDLAY, Ohio, May 1, 2012 – Marathon Petroleum Corporation (MPC) announced today that while it continues to evaluate strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value with respect to certain midstream assets, MPC`s board of directors has authorized and directed its evaluation team to further explore the formation and initial public offering of a master limited partnership (MLP) and to prepare a registration statement.

If MPC determines to further pursue an initial public offering of an MLP, the issuer would be a wholly-owned subsidiary, MPLX LP. MPC would contribute a portion of its midstream assets to the MLP and sell a minority interest in the MLP in an initial public offering. The potential MLP would support MPC`s strategy to grow its midstream business, initially through a contribution of an interest in certain onshore common carrier pipeline assets located in the Midwest and Gulf Coast regions of the U.S.

If pursued, MPC would expect to file a registration statement relating to the common units to be sold in a potential initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission during the third quarter, subject to final MPC board approval and prevailing market conditions.

There can be no assurance that the evaluation process will lead to an initial public offering of an MLP or any other transaction, or that if any transaction is further pursued, that it will be consummated. This announcement does not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. This announcement is being issued pursuant to, and in accordance with, Rule 135 under the Securities Act of 1933.

This announcement contains certain statements that are “forward-looking” statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 concerning MPC`s possible initial public offering of interests in an MLP.  These statements contain words such as “possible,” “intend,” “will”, “if” and “expect” and can be impacted by numerous factors including the risk that an initial public offering may not occur, risks relating to the securities markets generally, the impact of adverse market conditions affecting MPC`s midstream business, adverse changes in laws including with respect to tax and regulatory matters and other risks.  There can be no assurance that actual results will not differ from MPC`s expectations.  For more information concerning factors that could affect these statements see MPC`s most recent annual report on Form 10-K, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  MPC undertakes no obligation to update or revise such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur, or which MPC becomes aware of, after the date hereof.

# # #

MPC Update on Strategic Alternatives

The owner of this announcement warrants that:
(i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and
(ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the
information contained therein.

Source: Marathon Petroleum Corporation via Thomson Reuters ONE
HUG#1607605

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal business exercised an option to sell "a substantial portion" of its stake in A&E Television Networks to joint-venture partners, a filing from the media company showed.

Comcast, which owns almost 16 percent of A&E, exercised the option on March 26 and expects the deal to close in the second half of 2012, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this week.

"The parties are still discussing how much of the stake will be sold," The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Citigroup analyst Jason Bazinet estimated the stake's value at about $2 billion, the newspaper said citing a research report.

A&E, home to channels such as The History Channel and Lifetime, fell into Comcast's hands when it bought NBCUniversal from General Electric last year.

(Reporting By Dhanya Skariachan; Editing by Maureen Bavdek)