Lunch Wrap is a round up of the top news and views on FT Alphaville and FT.com as at noon, London time.
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This morning on FT Alphaville,
- Not one to take a rejection lightly, it seems Nasdaq, fresh from its abortive attempt to takeover the London Stock Exchange, is hunting at home and abroad for a potential partner. The stock exchange is in talks to buy the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, seeking to boost its presence in the rapidly growing options-trading business and a story that it is after OMX prompted a statement from the Swedish exchange this morning.
- SMG’s new management team unveiled a substantial shake-up at the media group on Thursday, including an IPO for Virgin Radio, as the company moves to focus itself on its core TV business.
- A buyout group led by Macquarie Bank has eased the conditions of its bid for Qantas Airways, making it more likely its takeover will succeed. The group, which includes TPG and Allco Equity Partners, will continue with the cash offer if investors holding 70 per cent of the stock accept, down from 90 per cent previously.
- It sounds like one of those minor bureaucratic readjustments but in China, the impact is major. A regulatory reclassification by Chinese authorities of 41 per cent state-owned Bank of Communications has dealt a blow to HSBC’s expansion strategy in China, reports the FT.
- Treat other people’s money as if it were your own is normally sound advice for anyone dealing in financial markets. But at WestLB, perhaps it should be the other way around. It emerged recently that the publicly owned German Landesbank once again lost a substantial amount of its own money in the market. This time, its equity proprietary trading desk got its bets on the direction of Volkswagen’s two share classes horribly wrong, and ended up with a €100m loss.
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