TheChek News Flow

Jiangxi Copper Company Ltd Exec: Expects global copper prices to recover from current levels due to improved demand

(358 HK)

Rupert Murdoch has taken a big step in the succession planning of his media empire by appointing his sons Lachlan and James to top roles.

Lachlan, 42, is to be non-executive co-chairman of 21st Century Fox and News Corp, and James, 41, is to be chief operating officer of 21st century Fox, reporting to but sharing many responsibilities with Chase Carey, the chief executive.

The brothers were already directors of both companies.

There is no new role for Elisabeth Murdoch, the third sibling from Rupert’s first marriage.

Rupert said he was “very pleased” Lachlan was returning to a leadership role in 21st century Fox.

“Lachlan is a strategic and talented executive with a rich knowledge of our businesses,” he said in a statement. “From 1994 to 2007, Lachlan’s executive career at the company spanned the globe, culminating as deputy chief operating officer responsible for the group’s most important publishing businesses in addition to its vast US television station holdings.”

In an internal memo to News Corp employees, Rupert wrote: “I asked that the new News have the sensibility of a start-up and that we focus on creative teamwork as we develop our core businesses, and I am proud of the efforts you have made in recent months, under the leadership of Robert Thomson.

“I have no doubt that Lachlan’s strategic sense and his passion for media and for knowledge will greatly assist Robert and me as we lead the company over the coming decade.”

Mr Carey said James’s appointment “in many ways . . . formalises the role he’s been playing for some time and acknowledges the contribution he has made in driving our business”.

The company said Mr Carey’s role in the company was still being determined. “We are finalising Chase’s extended agreement and are confident it will be completed shortly,” a spokesperson said.

James, who was heavily involved in the fallout of the hacking scandal at the News of the World and decision to close the British newspaper, will have direct responsibility for Fox Networks Group, which will now report to him and will also have direct responsibility for the strategic and operational development of the company’s interests in the pay-television Sky and Star services in Europe and Asia, respectively.

Lachlan is also currently an executive chairman of NOVA Entertainment Group – an Australian national FM network, executive chairman of Illyria Pty Ltd, and a director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Until recently, he also served as non-executive chairman of Ten Network Holdings.

BoEs Weale: Economy is looking better; wages are starting to grow

- Reiterates rates will not stay at 0.5% indefinitely, as economy normalizes rates should also normalize.

Europe should copy the US policies that facilitated the shale boom, writes Michael Levi

Calls are mounting for the US to export shale gas to Europe to help free the continent from Russian influence. Observers are right to focus on Moscow’s energy leverage but they are prescribing the wrong response. The most useful thing that Europe could import is not American gas itself but the open economic model that has enabled the US natural gas industry to thrive.

Europe buys nearly 30 per cent of its natural gas from Russia. This has led to concern that President Vladimir Putin might turn off a few taps to gain leverage in the confrontation with Ukraine. For now, these fears are overblown – among other things, Europe has a lot of natural gas in storage – but the fundamental worry is well founded.

Yet US natural gas exports would do little to reduce Russian leverage. They cannot replace Russian gas in the current crisis since it will be more than a year until any US export terminals are built. Even once these facilities are up and running, the economics of sending shale gas to Europe are unlikely to make much sense. Once the cost of shipping is included, Russian gas is far cheaper; Moscow’s share of the European market is not likely to change much. Instead, American gas will flow mainly to Asia.

This is not to say that US exports would not hurt Mr Putin. They would push down the price of gas in Europe, which is one of the many reasons why they should be allowed. But it is fanciful to suppose that they could provide a decisive edge against Moscow in a future crisis.

Europe’s politicians should instead put their energy into copying the successful US policies that laid the groundwork for a spectacular boom in natural gas production. This might allow Europeans to produce more gas at home instead of buying it from Russia. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that Europe has 598tn cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas, roughly half as much as the US. Yet almost none of this is being exploited. In part, that is because the continent is playing catch-up with a boom that started elsewhere. But there are deeper reasons, too. Many European countries have banned shale gas production. Those that allow development have slapped on taxes and government royalties that do much to deter it.

The US has lessons to offer on both fronts. Most gas-rich US states have rejected calls to prohibit shale gas production; instead, they have allowed development subject to robust environmental safeguards. The specifics vary from state to state. In Texas, a longtime energy producer, the industry has won public acceptance with less oversight than elsewhere. In Ohio or Illinois, which are new to the natural gas game, regulation is more stringent. Europeans would be wise to draw lessons from US states that have struck a balance between development and the environment.

The American shale gas industry has flourished on private land, where property owners are susceptible to commercial incentives. In Europe, mineral rights are generally publicly owned and unlikely to be privatised. Still, the more basic lessons – that government policy should be careful not to undermine the economics of gas development, and that care should be taken to ensure that local communities benefit from development – should be listened to carefully.

The US can also export lessons about gas markets. The US market responds efficiently to disruptions because regulators insist on open access to infrastructure such as pipelines, and enforce standards of transparency that ensure market participants are adequately informed. Europe has moved in this direction. Unlike the US, it needs to protect itself against foreign producers that might manipulate liberalised markets. Still, it has room to improve.

Focusing on steps such as these may be less attractive than talking up US natural gas exports: it denies America a chance to brag about its strategic influence and forces Europeans to grapple with their own political problems. The biggest opportunity to improve European security, though, comes from exporting the US model, not selling American gas.

Cherkizovo Group OJSC Acquires poultry producer LISKO Broiler; no terms disclosed

- APK Mikhailovsky LLC, which is a part of the Cherkizovo Group, acted as a buyer. The deal was approved by the Federal Antimonopoly Service.

- LISKO Broiler is the largest poultry producer in the Voronezh Region and one of the market leaders in the Central and Southern ederal Districts. Based on Russian Poultry Union data, LISKO ranks seventh among top poultry producers with a 2% nationwide market share. Its production capacity is approximately 95,000 tonnes (live weight) per year.

Hundreds of depositors have raced to pull their cash from a small rural bank in eastern China, forcing local officials to take emergency measures to calm the panic after the bank run began to spread.

Coming just weeks after the first true default in the Chinese bond market, the run on Jiangsu Sheyang Rural Commercial Bank is the latest sign of growing stresses in the country’s financial system.

But it has also been a localised event, contained to one farming county where a series of lightly regulated credit co-operatives and loan guarantee companies failed earlier this year after mismanaging funds.

Worried depositors rushed to Jiangsu Sheyang Rural Commercial Bank after rumours spread that it was on the verge of collapse, according to state media. The panic first hit the bank’s branch in an industrial park on Monday. On Tuesday, big queues of depositors gathered at its branches in at least three other villages in Sheyang county, according to the Xinhua news agency.

The bank took a series of steps to try to reassure people. Photographs showed that the bank had prepared large bricklike stacks of renminbi to meet the demand for withdrawals. On the dot matrix sign outside one stricken branch, the bank promised to operate uninterrupted for 24 hours to serve people withdrawing money.

At its doors, the bank broadcast a recorded message on repeat: “Savers’ deposits are protected by law. There is no situation in which we cannot meet cash withdrawal demands. Depositors must not listen to rumours and cause unnecessary panic.”

But these measures failed to allay concerns. Throughout the day on Tuesday, crowds gathered in the rain outside the bank to withdraw cash.

With the panic reaching other branches of the bank, the government intervened on Wednesday. In a video posted on the local government’s website, the governor of Sheyang county promised depositors that their mone

Last-minute jitters among investors led game developer King to price its US initial public offering at the midpoint of its range, as the company behind the blockbuster Candy Crush Saga faced concerns over its ability to repeat the app’s success.

London-based King raised $500m from the IPO late on Tuesday, valuing the company’s equity at $8bn on a fully diluted basis and making it one of the most valuable European technology companies to go public in years. It said that two-thirds of the funds raised would be used for “general corporate purposes” including acquisitions, while the remainder would go to investors selling down their holdings.

Link to Google Translation : {http://bit.ly/OTsDxI}

Link to Original French Article : {http://bit.ly/1goSzvD}

The recent history of France Telecom is emblematic of the current dynamics of the country. France Telecom, which still does not resign in this column to call the name of an intermediate position of traffic - which immediately precedes the stop position - is one of the finest companies in the world. After the very elitist Directorate General of Telecommunications, the company has never stopped being pioneer in all areas that concern. The development of the first optical fiber in 1970, the first time switch in the world in 1971 (CNET Lannion), Minitel in 1982, the first smart card, the radio, satellites launched by Arianespace, submarine cables marine Alcatel For decades, France Telecom has continued to fund, inspire or produce the most decisive in the field of telecommunications inventions. Like the great French successes in the field of energy and aerospace-defense, France Telecom is the sign and the factor of a French genius, ahead of global competition, particularly American.

And then something along the way, broke. We will not go here into the deleterious game of "finger pointing" and we affirm the contrary, without further precaution, the last leaders of France Telecom, Gérard Théry Stéphane Richard, were all rise successive missions and changing the state had entrusted to them.

This is precisely where the rub: for at least a decade, the project of the French government for this company, which is the largest shareholder, is absurd. It could be summarized as follows: the maximum rise in dividends to compensate for the inability of the state to balance its own for months.

Over the past five years alone, more than 18 billion euros have been raised to the shareholders of France Telecom. Everything was good to milk the cash cow: abandonment of research and development in France and significant foreign investments; agreement singular roaming, site closures and job cuts to all floors. The shareholder, devoid of any industrial state vision, turned into a manager of mutual funds at year performance bond. The financial markets , which is always wrong in the short term but not long-term, have sanctioned this depletion: since March 2009, the low point of the financial markets after the crisis "subprime", France Telecom has lost 40% of its value, nearly 20 billion euros. At the same time, the CAC 40 progressed by 50%; Iliad (Free) tripled in value, and Deutsche Telekom, which was equivalent to that France Telecom market value five years ago, is now worth double.

The losers are not only shareholders but also France Telecom employees. In this very union, where the practices of the French co-management is a powerful factor immobility and mismanagement, the only horizon, when it is not as dramatic recovery wave current suicide, is that of attrition and despair: 30,000 positions will be eliminated by 2020.

France Telecom, the country's image, deserves better than this short-sighted management and purely hexagonal proclaimed a decline. The future in the field of communication, carries exciting challenges, and job creation in the tens of thousands: building a European Internet network, as proposed by Angela Merkel Francois Hollande at the Council Franco-German Ministers of 19 February, the creation of a commercial offering and a regulatory framework giving Europeans the right to digital privacy, the rapid development of telecommunication and audiovisual markets in Africa, where France has more a playing card, especially under the Francophonie, and the necessary concentration of a European telecoms market, fragmented between more than 100 operators, where the U.S. market has only three.

The choice for the state shareholder, is binary. If it continues to have no strategy for its industrial holdings, then we must sell all, EDF in France Télécom, through Aéroports de Paris, Air France, etc.. These companies deserve real industrial shareholders with a strategic and capable of bearing dynamic growth vision: they find them in the private sector, in France and abroad. If, however, the French government would recover one day and give an industrial ambition, then the prescription is very different. It is always open these firms - in terms of capital, management and strategic vision - their European partners, particularly Germany. If the "Airbus" digital, energy and finance, to be anything other than slogans worn, it is time to actively prepare these reconciliations. For France Telecom, without underestimating governance issues, the obvious strategic alliance is that it will build with Deutsche Telekom, before developing all southern markets (Mediterranean, Africa) and East (Central Europe and Eastern) and deploy a credible offer technology provider in the area of ​​connectivity, "big data" cloud, etc.. Building together the European Internet; explore with budgets and methods of R & D and significant common now the potential that digital (virtual currency, cyber security, financial services) create long-term value for shareholders, and jobs by the tens of thousands. Like the country, it is in giving a European sustainable and vibrant future Orange happen in the green.