Fwd:OG: SEV FP / VIE FP mediapart translation: Altermind working for Suez



From: Nicolas Marmurek (OSCAR GRUSS & SON IN) At: 02/20/21 18:04:07
To: Laurent Chekroun (MAKOR SECURITIES LO )
Subject: OG: SEV FP / VIE FP mediapart translation: Altermind working for Suez
Veolia Suez. ALTERMIND, the Swiss army knife (Luxembourgish) from Suez to infantilize
FEB 19 2021 BY FLUIDAFLEUR BLOG: FLUIDAFLEUR'S BLOG
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In September 2020, Altermind experts had preached the good word (the merger is bad) in the media. Intelligence Online had identified a few: Olivier Babeau, Olivier de Maison Rouge, Bruno Alomar.

https://www.intelligenceonline.fr/réquence-d-affaires/2020/09/30/accusations-de-hacking-et-filatures-fantomes--la-guerre-entre-suez-et-veolia-vire-a -the-paranoia

ALTERMIND continues its support for SUEZ, which has just posted a 10-page summary of a report prepared by Patrice Geoffron, a professor at Paris Dauphine University, dated February 2021.

Suez-Veolia merger project
Does the ecological transition necessitate the creation of a “super world champion?”
February 2021
file: /// C: /Users/olivier/AppData/Local/Temp/SUEZ-Synthesis-Altermind-Geoffron-Report-Feb2021-EN.pdf

Of course, the good word is already relayed by media accustomed to the speech of the boss of Altermind, Mathieu Laine and his partner Erwan Le Noan. Example with Les Echos.

Opinion | The Suez-Veolia merger: a speculative sacrifice

The two main arguments against the operation developed by ALTERMIND make you smile.

First argument raised, being too big is bad.

Altermind had worked and maneuvered under the leadership of Alexandre Bompard with the Competition Authority for it to authorize the merger of FNAC with DARTY in July 2016.

For FNAC DARTY, too much was not bad.

The argument is therefore dazzlingly logical for Altermind.

We can recall the links with Altermind: a Vice President Emmanuel Combe who published a study for Altermind in June 2018, a President at the time of the merger Bruno Lasserre nicely qualified in January 2016 by Mathieu Laine in his book Dictionary in love with the freedom of "commander in the order of divine competition" (do not throw any more); the same Bruno Lasserre came in person to seek an award, a dedication in bookstores shortly after the book came out; without forgetting the partner Erwan Le Noan who was a rapporteur for the Competition Authority.

Between people of good company we manage to get along, don't we?

Small aside, one day investigative journalists will have to take a serious look at the Competition Authority: its independence, its rules, respect for its rules, the content of its decisions.

This control authority has a storefront, but the street does not have its entrances.

Second argument raised, it's bad for the environment.

Green altermind? Greta Thunberg must be bent over laughing. You will easily find what Mathieu Laine thinks of the Swedish girl.

Ecology for Altermind, it is its customers who would speak about it best: Syngenta, Total, Airbnb, Autostrade, Atlantia, Amazon, Aéroport de Paris.

A liberal is often for deregulation, the most relevant tool to fight against global warming?

What a brilliant second argument from Altermind.

ALTERMIND therefore plays the role of Swiss army knife on behalf of SUEZ.

Luxembourg knife in fact.

Because the parent company of the French company is based in Luxembourg while its main shareholder, Mathieu Laine is tax resident in London, for activities mainly located in France.

Decoders of the World, in their OPENLUX survey, certainly spotted the situation.

OpenLux: the insatiable appetite of the French for Luxembourg companies

Moreover, it is not in London that Mathieu Laine did the promotion in January 2021 of his latest book INFANTIZATION but in Paris.

It has multiplied in the complacent media: Le Figaro (twice, with Judith Waintraub then David Abiker), Le Journal du Dimanche, Le Point, Europe 1, France 5 (C à Vous), Les Echos (with his friend Daniel Fortin), Atlantico (of which he is a shareholder), Ouest France, LCI, France Inter, Elle, France Info. The list is not complete.

In flesh and blood for radios and televisions. Obviously promoting his book is a recognized compelling reason in these times of COVID.

We can also bet that the one who was called "Marquis de Macron" by the columnist of L'Humanité Maurice Ulrich will know how to send the right signals on Telegram.

February 6, 2019. The essayist Mathieu Laine, always surpasses himself. He dares everything and that's even how we recognize him.

It is all the same daring to put out a book to denounce the infantilization while wanting to make us swallow that we must not merge Suez and Veolia because it is bad for the planet.

Long live freedom of expression!

ALTERMIND, in French, it gives PENSER AUTREMENT.

With such procedures, the company could also have called itself ALTERKIND: to be nice (to its customers) otherwise.

CASH INVESTIGATION and Mathieu Laine, quite a story

It is also quite naturally that Mathieu Laine had made in 2016 the promotion of his favorite show, CASH INVESTIGATION, following the show which precisely took care of Luxembourg.

In the program of April 6, 2016 devoted to the Panama Papers, Élise Lucet set out in pursuit of the Baroness of Ariane de Rothschild, patron of the Private Bank Edmond de Rothschild, to question her about the actions of Marc Ambroisien.


An audio recording showed how Marc Ambroisien, then CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Europe, had facilitated the authorization to accept hundreds of millions of euros brought by Khadem Al Qubaisi, a national of Abu Dhabi, indicted by the American justice in the scandal of the century 1MDB of funds embezzled at the expense of Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund.

Mathieu Laine loved this show by publishing in the wake, on April 21, 2016, a rave article in his favorite cabbage leaf, Le Point: Mathieu Laine - Motion of defiance to the anti-liberal solicitation of "Cash investigation".


What a happy coincidence. An approach on its own account or on behalf of a close client or a close client?

ALTERKIND, to be of service otherwise.

In April 2020, Marc Ambroisien was banned from practicing for 10 years by the CSSF, the Luxembourg Financial Sector Supervisory Commission. Like what the report of CASH INVESTIGATION had aimed right. Without this program, it was Les Echos who would have unearthed the case, or L'Opinion?


Mathieu Laine, infantilize us then, take our hand to tell us which emissions we must avoid so as not to harm our liberal health.

Clarification: Regarding the merger between Véolia and Suez, I am rather unfavorable to this operation. This does not prevent alerting on the methods of lobbying firms that are paid to prevent the operation.
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WSJ : Burning Man’s Mission in a Post-Covid Worldv

Burning Man’s Mission in a Post-Covid World
The CEO of Burning Man Project talks about leading an organization that eschews hierarchy, and how the pandemic might make it more important than ever

Each year tens of thousands of people trek into the Nevada desert to erect a temporary metropolis and briefly experience a society founded on principles such as immediacy, generosity and inclusion. The eight-day gathering, Burning Man, is in part a psychedelic dance party, an interactive art extravaganza and a spiritual destination.

While Burning Man is built and run by those who attend the gathering, it has an organization behind it, and Marian Goodell has the unusual job of leading it. Since 2013, she has been the CEO of Burning Man Project, a nonprofit that supports the event and aims to extend its culture into the wider world. The organization has a nearly $50 million budget and offices in San Francisco and Reno, Nev.

Covid-19 posed a crisis for Burning Man, a mass gathering where hugs are the typical greeting. Ms. Goodell canceled the physical event in the late summer of 2020, sacrificing the organization’s main source of revenue (although in a subsequent fundraising campaign, thousands of ticket holders donated at least part of their refund) and organized a series of online gatherings in its place. With an eye on the evolving virus and vaccination efforts, she is still deliberating about this year’s event.

The Wall Street Journal spoke with Ms. Goodell about leading an organization that eschews hierarchy, and Burning Man’s future in a time of pandemic. Here are edited excerpts:

WSJ: What does leadership mean at Burning Man?

MS. GOODELL: There were six founders. And now there are 120 full-time, year-round employees. And they help facilitate a group of about 800 other staff, who then facilitate 10,000 official volunteers, who are all among the 80,000 participants.

A leadership philosophy, if there is one in Burning Man, is how you teach others and how you create leadership. My theory is really that Burning Man is a leadership machine: that the experience of coming to Burning Man—learning how to organically work with others to create a mission, a project, an art piece, just camping for eight days with 10 people—is an exercise in leadership. You can’t come to a blank desert that has no electrical lines and no phone lines and basically no internet and camp in any kind of group and not be using leadership principles.

The friction for me is how to be a decisive leader when necessary, but to create an organization that feels very empowered.

WSJ: Why does Burning Man Project have a CEO?

MS. GOODELL: We didn’t have a CEO until 2013. And the leadership structure initially didn’t really reflect anything traditional. We didn’t have a COO, a CFO, a C-anything. There was no C-suite and we were a little allergic to that word.

I initially called it the chief engagement officer because that’s most of what I do. I’m a traditional CEO on many levels, but initially, how do you go from a fairly decentralized, consensus-based organization facilitating this very unique cultural event, and how do you just put one person in charge of all that?

It was by necessity: If we wanted to be nimble, if we wanted to grow, and frankly if we really wanted to have a place out in the world, it wasn’t going to be by decentralized consensus-based decision making.

I’m there as an arbiter for final calls. When we canceled the 2020 event, there was no debate. But I’m still the one that puts it out there, because if it was a bad idea, I’ll take the heat.

WSJ: As CEO, do you see asserting your own independent vision for the organization as part of your role?

MS. GOODELL: I don’t think that the way that I manage vision in Burning Man is an autocratic top-down kind of thing.

Burning Man is seen by many people as a big event; what they often don’t realize is that we’re actually a cultural gathering of microcommunities. The microcommunities are, say, the folks that build and collaborate on an art car together and then run it. And so that little community has figured out its governance: how to manage money, how to get an art car there, how to camp together. And the decisions that I make for the proliferation of the culture come from helping stimulate that.

WSJ: Has there been any time when what you saw as best for Burning Man conflicted with the wider community, and how did you navigate that?

MS. GOODELL: It’s an interesting push-pull all the time. Asking the community to donate a portion of their tickets back last year, there were some members of the community who were absolutely completely down for it, and there were some members of the community who were incensed that we had the nerve to ask. The work that we did last spring and fall to continue raising money was completely for the survival of the event, not to line any of our pockets. But I would say that some of the feedback we saw and we read online would indicate that there is a part of the community that is very disappointed that we did things like that.

My decisions are often made from an institutional standpoint, and the community would like to see them made more from the heart space, if you will. That’s the sort of back-and-forth: business, culture, business, culture.

WSJ:Burning Man lost substantial revenue when the in-person 2020 event was canceled. How did you go about replacing it?

MS. GOODELL: We were always seen as having our major income from Black Rock City [the site of Burning Man]. This moment gave us an opportunity to change that.

Giving people an opportunity to donate their tickets back was super important because we’d already decided not to roll the tickets to another year. From a business standpoint, that was a no-brainer: You can’t take $23 million of tickets and just roll them on to the next year because that’s $23 million I wouldn’t have for 2021. But all these people that maybe haven’t donated before, they could make a contribution…which is what happened. In 2019 we had 6,000 people make some form of a donation. In 2020, we had 21,000.

WSJ: Over the past 30 years as the event in Nevada has grown in size from a few thousand participants to nearly 80,000 people in 2019, there has been a tension between making it accessible to more people and diluting the radical, arguably countercultural principles at its core.

MS. GOODELL: Burning Man founder Larry Harvey was very fond of saying that we aren’t countercultural, we’re cultural. What people really come away with from Burning Man, often, is a sense of hope in how they can participate in their community, and a desire to look and find opportunity to engage with people. It’s really interesting to be around people of all different types saying that what they got from Burning Man is what they got from their childhood and from their school and from their religious upbringing. And that’s hardly countercultural.

People who have been to Burning Man and have an opinion about what’s changed and what’s different and why they don’t like it, when you ask them, it’s often because they think there’s too much visibility in the outside world and there are too many rich people. The problem with that is no matter who you are, no matter what your income level is, Burning Man can be transformative.

WSJ: As the event becomes better known through Instagram, some participants have voiced concern about people profiting or acquiring celebrity from the event, contrary to its principles. What are the pluses and minuses of that visibility?

MS. GOODELL: It’s the “Insta” part that I think is the most problematic. How is it that taking the photo and sending it to the outside world enhances your sense of immediacy?

I saw photos of Burning Man in 1993, and it inspired me to go. And one of the first roles I took for the organization was media and photographers. And because I was getting my master’s degree in photography, I felt adamant that photographers were considered valid participants. So, we are into the pictures, and we’re into the visual element. It’s the degree to which that overtakes and affects the experience is what I think we would like to see minimized and reduced.

WSJ:How do you see the pandemic changing the event in the future?

MS. GOODELL: It’s probably going to be smaller—I don’t think we can do an 80,000-person event. My dad used to be in manufacturing, and I learned that you didn’t turn off all the machinery at Thanksgiving; you turned pieces of it off, because if you turn it all off, it takes too long to turn it back on again. We’re similar: We can scale some of it down, but we can’t go 50% smaller and have 50% less production.

Then there’s the spiritual side. There’s nothing like having an entire planet stay home for a year to really reflect on the way you operate personally. What are the ways in which you need people? What’s your attitude toward people when you do go out?

The pandemic has created some culture of fear. Burning Man has often been the antidote to fear. Post-Covid, it’s even more important to nurture a sense of connectivity and a sense of hope.

So how do we turn the opportunity to go to Black Rock City back on, and help people recognize that it isn’t just about going to Black Rock City? How do we message the opportunity to others about how you can gather in your own communities? You can put art in your town square in Toledo, Ohio, and have it be something that people will come around and sit together at the base of and talk about.

WSJ: When you discuss reducing the size of this year’s event, by how much are you contemplating?

MS. GOODELL: 65,000 is a number that we’ve been working with. People can camp a little farther apart. If you have fewer people, you have more space.

WSJ : United Flight Lands in Denver Following Engine Failure Shortly After Takeo

United Flight Lands in Denver Following Engine Failure Shortly After Takeoff
Local police say engine debris damaged property in plane’s flight path, but report no injuries


A United Airlines Holdings Inc. UAL 6.83% flight headed toward Honolulu returned to Denver International Airport after its right engine failed shortly after takeoff, the Federal Aviation Administration said Saturday.

The flight on a Boeing 777-200, a wide-body jet, landed safely in Denver less than 25 minutes after taking off, and none of the 231 passengers and 10 crew members were injured, United said in a statement.

“Flight 328 from Denver to Honolulu experienced an engine failure shortly after departure, returned safely to Denver and was met by emergency crews as a precaution,” the airline said.

Police in Broomfield, Colo., less than 20 miles from Denver, said they had received reports that large pieces of debris had fallen in a local park and neighborhoods around 1:08 p.m. local time. A spokeswoman for the Broomfield Police Department said no injuries had been reported but some property had been damaged. The FAA said in a statement it was aware of reports of debris near the airplane’s flight path.

The plane took off at 1:04 p.m. local time and climbed to an altitude of about 13,450 feet before descending and returning to the Denver airport, according to Flightradar24, a flight tracking site.

The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the incident, the agencies said. Broomfield police asked people to stay away from debris so the NTSB can evaluate it. United said it has been in contact with both agencies and with local law enforcement.

Engine failures are rare, but they do occur and pilots train to handle them. U.S. aviation-safety officials have said investigators see three or four such incidents a year. In 2018, a different type of engine broke apart on a Southwest Airlines Co. flight, and fast-moving debris ruptured a window, fatally injuring a passenger.

The 26-year-old aircraft on Saturday’s flight had two PW4000-series engines manufactured by Raytheon Technologies Corp.’s Pratt & Whitney unit, according to Flightradar24.

Raytheon declined to comment and referred questions to United. Boeing said its technical advisers were assisting the NTSB’s investigation.

FT : Diamonds from thin air: the search for a carbon-neutral jewel

Diamonds from thin air: the search for a carbon-neutral jewel
Makers of lab-grown stones vie with De Beers and Alrosa to attract climate-conscious consumers

They are among the world’s most valuable objects, formed billions of years ago deep beneath the earth’s surface then thrust hundreds of kilometres to its crust by volcanic eruptions before their eventual extraction.

But Dale Vince wants to make diamonds out of thin air.

“Mined diamonds I think are very time-limited now — the industry will come to an end, it’s a question of when,” said Vince. “We no longer need to mine the earth to make diamonds, because we can mine the sky.”

Vince, a UK entrepreneur who founded green energy group Ecotricity, is one of a growing number of producers of lab-grown diamonds. 

Identical in composition to their naturally formed counterparts, manufactured stones are cheaper, posing a challenge to the diamond mining industry led by De Beers and Russia’s Alrosa. They are sold by leading jewellery retailers from Swarovski to Warren Buffett’s Borsheims. 

The traditional extraction of diamonds and the lengthy, energy-intensive process of manufacturing can both leave a significant carbon footprint — something Vince wants to address to appeal to a growing number of environmentally conscious consumers.

Lab-grown stones are made either by mimicking natural formation using high pressure and heat or by a process known as chemical vapour deposition. With CVD a single-crystal diamond seed is placed in a chamber filled with hydrogen and a carbon-containing gas such as methane, then heated up to 1,200C. The carbon from the gas builds on the seed, forming diamond crystals.

Vince is unusual in that he even creates his own methane, a greenhouse gas that is a compound of carbon and hydrogen, by splitting hydrogen from water using electrolysis and taking carbon from the atmosphere.


Production of lab-grown diamonds has risen from about 2m carats in 2018 to 6m to 7m carats last year, according to consultancy Bain. That compares with mined production of 111m carats last year. 

The increased scale has helped push down prices, with a polished one carat lab-grown stone roughly a third cheaper than a polished mined diamond, according to Bain.

But while producers such as Diamond Foundry, a San Francisco start-up backed by film star Leonardo DiCaprio, use renewable energy such as hydropower, a growing number of rivals in countries such as India and China do not, say analysts.

Last year 50 per cent to 60 per cent of the world’s lab-grown diamonds were made in China, according to Bain.

“The challenge in the synthetic stone sector has not been revealing where their energy is coming from,” said Saleem Ali of the University of Delaware, who is working on a new standard to measure the environmental and social performance of diamonds.

At the same time, the mined diamond industry has moved to burnish its own green credentials. De Beers, a subsidiary of FTSE 100 mining group Anglo American, says it will move to using hydrogen-powered trucks and replace “nearly all” its fossil-fuelled electricity by developing dedicated wind and solar power plants.

The company is looking at removing its remaining carbon emissions by injecting carbon dioxide into old diamond mines to take advantage of the natural propensity of the kimberlite rock in which the stones are found to absorb carbon. It is also considering starting projects to support forest growth and looking at farming practices that help soils absorb more carbon on its large landholdings.


“The carbon footprint is starting to become an issue of interest for people that buy diamonds,” said Kirsten Hund, head of carbon neutrality at De Beers.

Alrosa, the world’s largest diamond miner, says it will spend $466m on improving its environmental footprint by 2024, including using lower-emission mining machines and managing waste. Eighty-six per cent of its electricity comes from renewable sources, it says.

Among the biggest challenges for lab-growers is that they lack the financial firepower of the miners when it comes to selling their products to consumers. “Marketing spend, by not only the man-made diamond industry but also the natural diamond industry, is likely what will ultimately determine the success in the long run,” said Paul Zimnisky, a New York-based diamond analyst.

Vince aims to set a single price for his diamonds of about $1,000 a carat because of their environmental credentials. His process uses 40 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce one carat, or four days’ worth of the average UK household’s energy use.

But Zimnisky said charging a premium for greener lab-grown diamonds could prove tricky because while consumers want a sustainable product they are not necessarily willing to pay more for it.

“If you’re trying to be the lowest-cost producer you don’t care about using hydropower as you aren’t going to get a premium for it,” he said. “You need to be able to sell it at a premium or build it as a brand.”

But Jessica Warch, co-founder of lab-grown jewellery retailer Kimai, said conscious consumers were not only concerned about the climate, and that the miners could not avoid the fact that they have to dig a big hole in the ground.

“From the perspective of sustainability it isn’t just being carbon neutral,” she said. “There’s much more to it. There’s the environmental and social perspective that’s rarely taken into account when people talk about carbon neutrality, which to us is the most important part.”

Kimai’s supplier of lab-grown diamonds, Israel-based Green Rocks Diamonds, is in the process of being certified by auditing company SCS Global Services for its sustainability footprint, according to its chief executive Leon Peres.

“It’s very confusing today, there are a lot of companies that are talking about sustainability and being carbon-neutral but they can’t really put proof to the claim,” Peres said. “When you see a new product coming into the market it’s kind of a free for all — there are no rules or regulations. But now you’re seeing consumers asking questions, the same questions they are asking about natural diamonds: what is the source?”

Amish Shah, of lab-grown producer ALTR Diamonds, believes the lab-grown industry will coalesce around new sustainability standards this year. He says his production facilities in India can easily move to using solar power and already use cow dung as the source of methane.

“I believe in the next 12 to 24 months we will see a major shift in consumer mindset which will force this industry to ensure that everything that is passing through is a low-carbon product,” he said. “And the lab-grown guys will push ahead.”

FT : Centrica chief vows to ‘strip out the rubbish’ to revive group’s fortunes

Centrica chief vows to ‘strip out the rubbish’ to revive group’s fortunes
Chris O’Shea admits the British Gas owner needs to prove it can profit from the shift to green energy

Centrica is talking to the government about how to finance a conversion of Britain’s biggest gas storage site to hydrogen, as its new chief executive faces pressure to prove the company will profit from the transition to cleaner energy.

Chris O’Shea also sees an opportunity in trading the electricity generated by wind farms on behalf of their owners as he tries to revive the fortunes of the more than 200-year-old company best known as the owner of British Gas.

British Gas was one of the jewels of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s privatisation programme, but Centrica has floundered strategically in recent years. It has lost more than 80 per cent of its market value and 3m customers in the past decade.

It was the worst performing European utility in 2020 and was booted from the FTSE 100. Meanwhile peers such as Denmark’s Orsted and Spain’s Iberdrola, now known as “new energy majors” because of their hefty investments in renewables, are becoming the new stock market favourites.

In a rare interview ahead of its annual results this week, O’Shea admitted he would not have designed Centrica’s business model “if I’d had a blank sheet of paper”. He insisted, however, the company still had “unique opportunities” to participate in the energy transition as the UK and Ireland strive to stop contributing to climate change by 2050. 

British Gas was among the early investors in offshore wind 20 years ago, but Centrica has since sold its wind farms along with big, central fossil fuel plants to focus on customer-facing businesses including energy supply and “smart” home devices such as a thermostat that can be controlled via an app. Its oil and gas joint venture is also on the block.

But those markets have faced challenges, including a boom in smaller, cheaper energy suppliers and a government cap on household bills. Or they have disappointed; in 2019 Centrica abandoned a £1bn revenue target for its smart homes business.


O’Shea, who took the top job at Centrica last year, said the group already has 12 gigawatts of energy assets under management, helping the owners of the assets optimise their returns on the electricity they generate. He sees this as a real “growth area” as investors pour money into the likes of offshore wind — something Centrica itself is unlikely to re-enter any time soon as returns are lower than its cost of capital.

“If you have got a financial investor who wants to build a wind farm for example, they may not want to have a trading business to optimise the plant, we provide that service to them,” the 47-year-old said.

“I’d love if we were something like Orsted but we are not,” said O’Shea.

The company, which has 7m energy customers, has also been in preliminary discussions with the government on finance models that could allow it to upgrade its Rough gas storage site off the Yorkshire coast, the largest facility of its kind in Britain. 

The nearly four-decades-old facility was closed to new supplies of natural gas in 2017 following failures in its ageing wells, but O’Shea believes it could be refurbished to house low carbon hydrogen, one of the key “green” technologies backed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The Centrica boss estimates the cost at about £650m but said it would likely need a “regulated model” to encourage the group to invest.

Centrica has agreements with manufacturers such as Volkswagen and Ford to fit electric vehicle chargers. It also has an 8,000-strong workforce of engineers, the largest in the sector, that O’Shea said could be deployed to help households convert from natural gas to low carbon heating systems and improve the energy efficiency of properties.


He will argue that Centrica can tackle the energy transition at a capital markets day later this year as he faces heat from a number of top shareholders.

“For that company to survive, they need to think more about the [energy] transition,” one top 30 shareholder told the Financial Times.

Another said: “We have been pushing them quite hard about being part of the energy solution.”

O’Shea was born in Fife in Scotland and studied finance and accounting at Glasgow University. He was Centrica’s chief financial officer for just over a year before taking the top job from Iain Conn, whose tenure was marred by profit warnings and sweeping job losses. 

O’Shea’s start has not been uneventful, however. He was forced last year to suspend Centrica’s dividend as commodity prices slumped during the pandemic’s first wave and businesses struggled to pay their bills.

He ordered a further 5,000 jobs cuts, half from management and corporate roles, to resolve Centrica’s “overly-complicated” structure. An effort to tackle its 80 different employment contracts has led to a bitter ongoing dispute with the GMB union.

“This is definitely a turnround story,” said O’Shea, admitting “2021 could still be quite a tough year for us”, although analysts at Barclays believe there is scope for a “significant” share price recovery this year.

O’Shea insists he is trying to end Centrica’s spiral of decline to “make sure this business cannot only survive but actually grow in the future”.

“I don’t think we have managed this business in the way that it should’ve been managed if I’m being really blunt,” he says.

Investors, he said, are “tired of grand strategic gestures which take lots of money”. Centrica previously spent £1m a week on management consultants amounting to a £200m bill over four years.

“I found our results announcements not quite impenetrable but really quite difficult. I didn’t really learn much from them, they were really verbose,” he said.

“We’ll just strip out the unnecessary rubbish, whether it’s in the organisation structure . . . how many committees we’ve got, how many managers we’ve got or how we communicate with people.”

>>> Will SPACs Outpace Traditional IPOs This Year?

Will SPACs Outpace Traditional IPOs This Year?

Last year, I called 2020 “the year of the SPAC.” Well, SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies, are still on a tear in 2021, and now the question is whether initial public offerings of these blank-check companies will outpace traditional IPOs this year.

Patrick Healey, founder and president of Caliber Financial Partners, thinks so, at least when it comes to the number of SPACs going public.

“I think the volume of SPACs is going to certainly outweigh the number of IPOs, but the IPOs are going to be bigger deals,” Healey told me in an interview.

The data seems to back that prediction up.

So far in 2021 there have been 145 SPAC initial public offerings that have raised more than $44.5 billion, according to data from SPAC Insider. The average deal size was $307 million, according to the research firm.

That compares with 55 traditional IPOs that have raised $21.7 billion so far this year, per data from IPO research firm Renaissance Capital.

For context, 248 SPAC IPOs raised $83 billion total last year, per SPAC Insider. That deal and dollar volume count was already record-breaking, as it was more than six times the amount raised in 2019 and more than four times the number of SPAC IPOs in 2019.

Less than two months into 2021, SPACs are on pace to smash through that record again.

“As of now, SPACs are outpacing IPOs almost 2-to-1, which is even a much larger proportion of the market than last year, and last year was a record,” Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, said in an interview.

SPACs are essentially blank-check companies. The founders of the SPAC form a company, raise money by going public, and then identify a different company to acquire and take public in the process. Target companies that go public via a merger with a SPAC typically go through a cheaper and faster process than going public through an IPO.

Investor Chamath Palihapitiya, labeled recently by Bloomberg as the “King of SPACs,” could arguably be credited with popularizing SPACs in the past year, as he’s taken companies like Virgin Galactic, Clover Health, and Opendoor Technologies public via mergers with blank-check companies. Other high-profile figures like former House Speaker Paul Ryan, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and athlete Colin Kaepernick have also formed SPACs.

The public markets are valuing fast-growing companies highly these days, so SPACs are targeting companies that are also in those sectors, Healey said. Many target companies might be pre-revenue, but they have the potential for growth.

“If you look at all of the overwhelming majority that get targeted by SPAC sponsors, it’s high-growth, innovative, and disruptive technologies: EV, fintech, cloud-based software, SaaS, battery tech, sustainable energy, online payment processing. You’re going to see a number of them target cryptocurrency,” Healey said.

The number of SPACs this year, according to Healey, is a result of the industries targeted by SPAC sponsors being “really hot.”

Without a SPAC, those target companies would likely stay private longer, since some tend to be pre-revenue like electric vehicle (EV) and battery tech companies. But through a SPAC, companies are able to tap into the public markets earlier to raise capital and fuel growth. And for investors, they’re able to benefit from getting in on the action earlier, rather than waiting until after an IPO has taken place and buying in on the secondary market after so much of the value has been created, Healey said.

Healey predicts that SPACs will lead deal volume in 2021, followed by traditional IPOs, then direct listings.

One potential challenge, though, with the SPAC boom is the ability of all of those blank-check companies finding target companies to acquire in the allotted two-year time period. Two years is typically the time frame set for a SPAC to identify a target company and acquire it, though some SPACs have opted for 18 months and some SPACs’ governing rules may let it extend its allotted period, according to the SEC. Once a SPAC lists its securities on an exchange, it must complete a merger within three years, per securities regulations.

“The number of SPAC merger announcements is behind traditional IPOs, so we’re seeing the backlog of SPACs filling up,” Kennedy said. “SPACs are pricing faster than they can find targets. So far this year, we’ve counted 43 SPACs that have announced merger targets. Compare that to the (145) that have priced. So we need to see the M&A pace pick up because…. these blank check companies do have an expiration date.”

That will likely lead to more competition among SPACs to find targets, Kennedy said, adding that he’s heard many companies considering IPOs have already received two or three calls from interested SPACs. On the other hand, some companies that were predicted to pursue an IPO, such as Beachbody, are now opting to go the SPAC route.

The pipeline for both SPACs and traditional IPOs seems to be robust, and Healey expects it to accelerate. There are currently 122 SPACs that have filed for an IPO, and 145 that are searching for targets according to SPAC Insider.

But there are still big name companies proceeding with traditional IPOs or direct listings. They include Oscar Health, which is going public via a traditional IPO, and Coinbase, which is heading to the public markets via a direct listing.

With a pipeline like that, it looks like the SPAC boom is just getting started.

WSJ : Bitcoin’s Value Is All in the Eye of the ‘Bithodler’

Bitcoin’s Value Is All in the Eye of the ‘Bithodler’
The digital currency has skyrocketed, and yet determining its fair value is a tricky business

The total market value of bitcoin crossed $1 trillion on Friday as the price surged above $55,000.

Passionate backers are fond of saying the digital currency is on a trajectory “to the moon.” For the less faithful, determining bitcoin’s value is much more complicated.


Bitcoin has skyrocketed since the beginning of 2020 when it was trading around $7,000. A steady stream of institutional demand has been credited with driving much of that rally. Billionaire hedge-fund managers disclosed purchases: Paul Tudor Jones called it a “great speculation.” A handful of companies, most notably Tesla Inc., TSLA -0.77% recently started buying it for their corporate reserves.

Yet determining a fair value for bitcoin is much harder than valuing stocks, investors say, both because bitcoin isn’t a traditional asset and because much about it is misunderstood.

“It’s a difficult asset class to value,” said J.P. Morgan JPM 1.67% analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, who estimates the value of one bitcoin could be as little as $11,000 or as much as $146,000.

The low end of that range is what it currently costs in computing power to create a bitcoin, he said, while the high end marks bitcoin’s estimated value if its market capitalization were to match that of gold. Almost any price in between could be justified because of the intense interest from retail buyers, he added.

Bitcoin’s backers are a passionate bunch, less concerned with fundamental analysis than a fervent belief that bitcoin is the future. That ethos is summed up in a single word: hodl, a misspelling of “hold” from an impassioned 2013 post on a bitcoin forum by a trader during one of bitcoin’s periodic crashes. It means always keep buying, no matter what, and never sell. To these people, bitcoin’s value is limitless.

To others, determining bitcoin’s value is tricky. Bitcoin has properties that make it appear more like a commodity—indeed, the Internal Revenue Service classifies it as such—and properties that make it appear more like a currency, as Japan’s Financial Services Agency classifies it.

Yet it really isn’t either. Bitcoin is a software program designed to facilitate online exchange, to mimic physical cash, without the need for a bank or other middleman to guarantee the exchange.

One of the most popular arguments for bitcoin? It’s a modern version of gold and a store of value. That belief rests mainly upon one specific feature of bitcoin’s programming, a limit of 21 million placed on the number of bitcoins that could be created. That, its backers argue, makes bitcoin a scarce commodity and a deflationary rather than inflationary asset, at least compared with government-backed currencies.

Bitcoin, however, does have its own rate of inflation, albeit an entirely predictable one that is designed to decrease in the long run. Currently, 6.25 bitcoins are created roughly every 10 minutes, and nearly 19 million of the intended 21 million bitcoins are already in circulation. That results in a current inflation rate of roughly 2.2%, according to Bitcoin.com.

For comparison’s sake, that is higher than both the Federal Reserve’s stated goal of 2% and the most recent Consumer Price Index rate of 1.4%.


Bitcoin’s inflation rate will drop to zero some time around the year 2140 when the last of the 21 million bitcoins are minted.

The effective inflation rate is likely higher. Nearly 80% of bitcoin’s supply is illiquid, analytic firm Glassnode estimates, held by long-term investors who won’t sell. Only about 4.2 million bitcoins are in circulation. That small supply is currently far outstripped by demand.

Another way of analyzing these dynamics, and one popular among bitcoiners, is the stock-to-flow model, a framework used to value commodities like gold and silver, made popular on social media by an anonymous trader dubbed Plan B.

Stock to flow measures the ratio of existing stockpiles to production. It is essentially another way of stating bitcoin’s inflation rate. By this model, bitcoin should trade more like gold and silver, Plan B argued. To the trader’s credit, back in 2019 Plan B predicted that the model implied bitcoin should have a $1 trillion market value and trade at $55,000 some time after May 2020. That prediction was fulfilled Friday.


But if bitcoin is supposed to be a gold alternative, its price is already in line with gold, J.P. Morgan’s Mr. Panigirtzoglou argues. Bitcoin’s market value is around $1 trillion, and the market value of privately held gold is around $2.7 trillion, he estimates. But in a portfolio that also takes into account volatility, like one managed by a professional money manager or corporate treasurer, bitcoin’s much higher volatility means that the two would essentially be evenly weighted, he said.

Because portfolio managers and corporate treasurers need to take that volatility into account, he said he doesn’t expect much more institutional money to be invested in bitcoin unless its price tumbles.

“For institutional investors, it is unrealistic here to expect them to ignore the volatility of bitcoin,” he said.

To that point, a Gartner survey last week found only 5% of finance executives plan to hold bitcoin as a corporate asset in 2021. Moreover, 84% said they never intend to buy bitcoin.

Meanwhile, the highly publicized flurry of institutional interest in bitcoin may be smaller than it appears. Since September, only about $11 billion of professional money has entered the bitcoin market, Mr. Panigirtzoglou estimates. That isn’t enough to drive a $800 billion change in total value and instead suggests that the attention given to institutional investors has drawn in more retail interest, he said.

Therefore, what is driving bitcoin’s price isn’t some fundamental value proposition, but instead simple retail-driven momentum trading, Mr. Panigirtzoglou said.

There is a simpler way of defining bitcoin’s fundamental value, according to Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. Most forms of “money,” everything from commercial bank deposits to Treasury bills, pay some amount of interest, no matter how small. Bitcoin doesn’t. And while government-issued money doesn’t pay interest, it is a universally recognized means of payment, unlike bitcoin.

“Bitcoin’s fundamental value is zero,” Mr. Hanke said. “It’s almost all speculative.”

FT : Nobu chief says hotels must look to home markets to survive crisis

Nobu chief says hotels must look to home markets to survive crisis
Head of luxury group expects chains with business travel focus to be hardest hit

Hotels must focus on attracting locals if they are to survive the pandemic, the chief executive of the Nobu hotel and restaurant group has said, as the stumbling rollout of vaccines globally delays the recovery of international travel.

“That is where the business is now today. It is really about the domestic tourism and working with regional markets,” said Trevor Horwell, who has headed the luxury hospitality company since 2009.

Nobu, which operates hotels in major international hubs such as London, Las Vegas and Barcelona, has eight out of its 13 hotels open but said that in Miami, for example, 70 to 80 per cent of occupancy was domestic guests.

With cross-border travel likely to remain far below historic levels for most of 2021, the hotel sector has rushed to find alternative revenue streams from empty rooms. Accor and CitizenM have both opened up unused spaces as co-working areas and fitness studios, while Radisson is working with Zoom to provide remote conferencing for business guests to connect with others around the world.

For the hotels that are open, trade is tough. According to analysts at Morgan Stanley, average room rates across the UK, Europe and the US are roughly 35 per cent below last year’s levels.

Horwell said he expected most financial distress among large, functional hotels that target business guests as the corporate travel sector would take longest to recover. Some travel executives have suggested it may be permanently reduced by as much as 30 per cent thanks to workers becoming acclimatised to video calls.

Nobu was co-founded in 1994 by the actor Robert De Niro, chef Nobu Matsuhisa and film producer Meir Teper. Its restaurants became known as social hotspots for celebrities such as Kate Moss, Elton John and David Beckham.

The group does not publish accounts but said in 2018 that it aimed to reach $1bn in revenues in five years as it expanded its global hotel portfolio at a rate of about four sites per year. It has 47 restaurants and opened three hotels last year.

The company met its revenue targets for 2020, it said, but many of its 10,000 staff were on furlough for large parts of the year. It was forced to take 14 crisis loans totalling up to $28m in the US, government filings show, and owners of its hotels have suffered. Selenta, the Spanish hotel group that owns its newly built Barcelona hotel, sold the property for a reduced price of €80m to the German real estate fund ASG — €20m less than it was bought for, according to the Spanish newspaper El País.

In December its new hotel on Portman Square in London opened for just two weeks before coronavirus regulations forced it to close, while its recent Warsaw site only reopened last week.

“Everyone has hit the ground hard and we have all been affected. We had to dig deep in terms of making sure the business continues,” Horwell said.

Graeme Smith, managing director at the consultancy AlixPartners, said there was optimism around investment in hotels as other property assets such as retail and office sites looked set to come under more permanent pressure: “There’s a greater reallocation of money to things like pubs and hotels — that kind of operational real estate.”

TechCrunch : As the SPAC frenzy continues, questions arise about how much the ma

As the SPAC frenzy continues, questions arise about how much the market can absorb

Another week and the biggest story in a sea of big stories continues to center on SPACs, these blank-check companies that raise capital through IPOs expressly to acquire a privately held company and take it public. But some industry watchers as starting to wonder: Is the party just getting started, with more early guests still trickling in? Have we reached the party’s peak, with the music still thumping? Or did someone just quietly barf in the corner, a sure indicator that it’s time to grab one’s coat and leave?

It certainly feels like things are in full swing. Just today, B Capital, the venture firm cofounded by Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin, registered plans to raise a $300 million SPAC. Mike Cagney, the fintech entrepreneur who founded SoFI and more recently founded Figure, a fintech company in both the home equity and blockchain space, raised $250 million for his SPAC. Even Michael Dell has made the leap, with his family office registering plans this afternoon to raise a $500 million blank-check company.

Altogether, according to Renaissance Capital, 16 blank-check companies raised $3.4 billion this week, and new filers continue to flood into the IPO pipeline, with 45 SPACs submitting initial filings this week (compared with 10 traditional IPO filings). Perhaps it’s no wonder that we’re starting to see headlines like one in Yahoo News just yesterday titled, “Why some SPAC investors may get burned.”

Interestingly, such headlines could gum up the SPAC machine. So argues Ivana Naumovska, an assistant professor at INSEAD, in a new Harvard Business Review piece titled, “The SPAC Bubble is About to Burst.”

Naumovska points to research showing that when more people adopt a practice, it will become increasingly widespread due to growing awareness and legitimacy. Yet when it comes to something that’s more controversial — which it could be argued that SPACs are — outsider concern and skepticism also grows as the practice becomes more widely used. Thus are born headlines like that one in Yahoo Finance.

Naumovska has studied this phenomenon before, focusing on earlier reverse mergers that, as she notes, “surged in the mid-2000s, outnumbering IPOs in some years, and peaked in 2010, before falling off a cliff in 2011.” She says she and fellow researchers collected a plethora of data on the use of reverse mergers and market responses to them, including how the media evaluated such vehicles. Of the 267 articles published between 2001 and 2012, she says, 6 were positive, 148 were neutral, 113 were negative.

Notably and unsurprisingly, the negative articles grew as the number of reverse merger transactions involving firms with relatively low reputations increased. And as the media picked up on these companies, so did regulators, and with investors, regulators, and the media feeding off one another’s signals, the party came to a screeching halt.

Anecdotally, most of the coverage around SPACs right now remains neutral. If business reporters are privately skeptical of SPACs, they are reserving judgment, possibly because save for some highly concerning cases — like when the electric truck startup Nikola was accused of fraud — there isn’t much to criticize yet.

It’s impossible to judge many of the SPACs raised over the last six months, as they have yet to announce their targets (SPACS have two years from the time they raise funds to zero in on a target, or else give back their IPO proceeds).

The argument that most investors have for creating a SPAC — which is that a lot of so-called unicorn companies are ready to be publicly traded — resonates, too, given how bloated the private market has become.

In the meantime, some of the merger deals that critics have long expected would begin to unravel have not, like Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company that kicked off SPAC mania when it went public in the fall of 2019.

Sir Richard Branson founded the company in 2004 in order to fly passengers on suborbital spaceflights, but even after putting off plans yet again to attempt a rocket-powered flight to suborbital space last week, its shares — which have more than doubled since January– remain in the figurative stratosphere. (The company, which reported almost no revenue last year, is currently valued at $12 billion.)

Other offerings haven’t gone quite as smoothly. Clover Health, a health insurance company that, like Virgin Galactic, was taken public via a SPAC organized by famed investor Chamath Palihapitiya, is “facing a confluence of existential threats” to its business, as observed in a deep dive by Forbes.

Among others poking into business practices are the The Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and influential short-sellers. (Clover has rebutted the allegations, but Forbes says it is still facing at least three class-action lawsuits over its failure to disclose ahead of its IPO that the DOJ was investigating the company.)

“I don’t get it,” said skeptic Steve Jurvetson last month in conversation with this editor of the SPAC frenzy. The veteran venture capitalist, who sits on the board of SpaceX, said there are “some good companies [being taken public]. Don’t get me wrong; they aren’t all fraudulent.” But many are “early-stage venture companies,” he noted, “and they don’t need to meet the forecasting requirements that the SEC normally requires of an IPO, so [SPAC sponsors are] specifically looking for companies that don’t have any operating numbers to show [because they] can make any forecasts they want . . .That’s the whole racket.”

If others agree with Jurvetson, they hesitate to say so publicly. For one thing, plenty of VCs would be happy to see their portfolio companies taken public however possible, including via SPAC. Others who haven’t formed SPACs of their own are reserving the right to consider them down the road.

Ed Sim of Boldstart Ventures in New York is one of few VCs in recent months to say outright, when asked, that his firm isn’t considering raising a SPAC any time soon. “I have zero interest in that honestly,” says Sim. “You can come back to me if you see my name or Boldstart [affiliated] with a SPAC two years from now,” he adds, laughing.

Many more investors stress that when it comes to SPACs, it’s all about who is sponsoring what. Among them is Kevin Mayer, the former Disney exec and, briefly, the CEO of the social network TikTok. In a call yesterday, Mayer advanced the idea that there are “many fewer public companies now than there were 10 years ago, so there is a need for supplying another way to go public.”

Mayer has a vested interest in SPACs. Just yesterday, along with former Disney colleague Tom Staggs, he registered plans for a second a SPAC, after it was announced earlier this month that their first SPAC will be used to take public the digital fitness specialist Beachbody. But Mayer also argues that not every SPAC should be judged by the same yardstick.

“Do I think it’s overdone? Sure, everyone and their brother is now getting to a SPAC, so yeah, that does seem a bit ridiculous. But I think . . . the wheat will be separated from the chaff very, very soon.”

It may need to be if SPACs are to endure.

While the mechanism has won over powerful adherents, working against SPACs are numbers that are starting to trickle in and that don’t look so great.

Last week, for example, Bloomberg Law shared its analysis of the companies that went public as a result of a merger with a SPAC dating back to Jan. 1, 2019 (and for which at least one month of post-merger performance data is available). In it, 14 out of 24 reported a depreciation in value as of one month following the completion of the merger, and one-third of the companies reported a year-to-date depreciation in value.

The number of securities lawsuits filed by SPAC stockholders post-merger is also on the rise, noted the outlet.

Given the astonishing rate at which SPACs are now being formed anyway, the question of whether the phenomenon is sustainable is one that more people are naturally beginning to ask.

For her part, Professor Naumovska thinks she already knows the answer.