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Tories secure majority, Centamin appoints interim chief executive

By Josh White

Date: Friday 13 Dec 2019

(Sharecast News) - London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open nine points higher on Friday, having closed up 0.79% at 7,273.47 on Thursday.
General election

Boris Johnson's Conservative Party was set for a large majority in parliament after winning seats in traditional Labour heartlands as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said he would not contest the next election.

The pound surged on the prospect of political stability and a possible resolution to the Brexit crisis that has crippled the country for three years.

Sterling soared to just under $1.35 to the pound not long after 2200 GMT, and was last up 2.36% at $1.3471.

Earlier in the day it was sitting around the $1.30 level, with chatter among currency traders suggesting they believed a Tory majority was priced in at around $1.32.

The first exit poll, which surveyed 23,790 voters as they left 144 polling stations on Thursday, pointed to a 50-seat gain for the Conservatives to 368 seats. A party needs 326 seats for an outright majority in the House of Commons.

By 0600 GMT the Tories had secured 359 seats, including several in Labour's "red wall" that it had targeted with one of the biggest surprises being the Northumberland former mining community of Blyth Valley, where Conservative candidate Ian Levy won 17,440 votes, or 42.7%, to Labour candidate Susan Dungworth's 16,728, or 40.9%.

Stocks to watch

Centamin has appointed chief financial officer Ross Jerrard as interim chief executive with immediate effect to replace Andrew Pardey, who has left the company.

Helios Underwriting announced on Friday that, in line with its strategy of increasing underwriting capacity through acquisition, it has acquired Catbang 926 - a limited liability member of Lloyd's of London. The consideration payable for Catbang was £5.6m in cash, of which £2m would be paid on completion, and the balance paid within 60 days of that.

Legal and professional services group Gateley Holdings announced the acquisition of T-three Group for a consideration of £3.4m on Friday. It said T-three would complement Kiddy & Partners, which Gateley acquired in July 2018, with those businesses together creating one of the largest specialist human capital consultancy businesses in the UK.

Amiad Water Systems said it expects its revenue for 2019 to be slightly below market expectations, which the company blamed on "a number of global macroeconomic factors". The AIM traded company added that, as a result of the lower turnover, it also anticipates that net profit will fall $3m-$5m below market expectations.

Newspaper round-up

The US and China have reportedly reached a limited deal that would pause escalating trade tensions and pave the way towards ending a bruising trade war between the world's two largest economies. The two sides have reached an agreement "in principle" that would see the US roll back some of the tariffs on $360bn of Chinese goods in exchange for Chinese commitments to buy US agricultural products and other concessions, according to US media reports on Thursday.- Guardian

Fifteen Cornwall in Watergate Bay, one of the last outposts of Jamie Oliver's UK restaurant empire, has closed its doors with the loss of 100 jobs. Chefs and waiting staff at the restaurant, which uses the celebrity chef's name under licence but is owned and run by a charitable trust, were told the business would be shutting its doors on Thursday afternoon. About 70 people work at the restaurant and a further 30 work at the Cornwall Food Foundation charity, which will also be wound up. - Guardian

The Royal Bank of Scotland is to pay £40m in compensation to 730,000 customers after it uncovered a group of rogue staff "skimming" cash on foreign money transfers over four years. Workers on the lender's foreign exchange desk manipulated the rates applied to overseas transactions between 2010 and 2014 - earning Natwest owner RBS tens of millions of pounds in extra profits. One customer, believed to be a large business, is to receive £70,000 in redress. - Telegraph

Coventry Building Society revealed last night that it had been exaggerating its financial strength for the past 11 years because of a calculation error. In an admission which has echoes of the Metro Bank debacle, Coventry said it had understated its risk-weighted assets by £222 million as of June 30. This meant that its common equity tier 1 ratio, a measure of financial strength, was 32.6 per cent, not the 34.2 per cent stated in its last results. - The Times

Mike Lynch was accused in the High Court yesterday of telling "lie after lie" in a $5 billion civil fraud trial brought against the Autonomy founder by Hewlett-Packard. The former chief executive of the British software company, which he started in 1996, is engaged in a legal dispute with the American computing giant in London. HP bought Autonomy in August 2011 for $11 billion but a year later wrote $8.8 billion off the value of the acquisition. It estimates that about $5 billion of the impairment was because of "accounting improprieties". - The Times

US close

Wall Street markets broke fresh records on Thursday, after amid reports that Washington and Beijing had reached a deal to avoid fresh punitive tariffs planned by the Trump administration for 15 December.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 0.79% at 28,132.05, the S&P 500 added 0.86% to 3,168.57, and the Nasdaq Composite was 0.73% firmer at 8,717.32.

Those were record high closes for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite, while the Dow managed to reach a new intraday record high during the session.

At the open, the Dow was 290.28 points higher, after it saw out the previous session relatively flat following the latest policy announcement from the Federal Reserve.

Members of the Federal Open Market Committee voted to keep the target range for the Fed funds rate at between 1.5% and 1.75%, as expected, explaining that the decision was an "appropriate" one to sustain economic expansion, and keep inflation near its 2.0% target.

Early on Thursday's session, indices skyrocketed into the green after Donald Trump took to Twitter to tell the world that the US and China were "getting very close to a big deal" on trade.

"They want it, and so do we!" Trump said.

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