IN&M results merit some exceptional PR: Never a man to shun the bright lights of publicity when he has good news to share, Sir Anthony O'Reilly engaged no fewer than six public relations consultants from four companies to assist with the release of results this week from Independent News & Media.
It's not as if the company had something to hide. With profits, sales and margins on the rise - not to mention those all-important dividends - this was a heavyweight public relations push with troops on the job in Dublin, London and New York.
Independent chose Pat Walsh of Murray Consultants and Mark Kenny and Jonathan Neilan of K Capital Source to spread the good news in Dublin. Rory Godson of Powerscourt Media was on the job in London, while Declan Kelly and Paul Keary of Financial Dynamics got the gig in New York. By any standards, that's more than enough cooks.
But for all the PR, questions remain about some of the exceptionals in the 2005 accounts. As NCB analyst Tricia McEvoy pointed out, the once-off items included expenditure to protect the company's position in Britain.
"The €6 million spent defending its UK market position has been included as an exceptional item in 2005, along with start-up costs for the Herald AM in Ireland and costs associated with launching compact editions in the UK and Belfast," she said in a note.
"However, it can be argued that the €6 million is a cost for being in the competitive UK market. Treating this cost as a non-exceptional item would reduce the operating profitability of the UK operations in 2005 from €15.1 million to €9.1 million."
In PR parlance, this may be heresy. But Current Account thinks the point to be well made.
UK housing market feels stamp duty pinch
Current Account was interested to note that estate agents and mortgage lenders in the UK are up in arms over the rising cost of stamp duty for home buyers.
Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that, with the average price of a home in the British capital standing at £257,120, London house buyers are facing stamp duty bills of around £7,700 (€11,100).
"If only . . .", hard-pressed Dublin buyers could be forgiven for thinking.
With the average Dublin house now costing €368,500, stamp duty bills of more than €22,000 - or nearly double the UK level - are being levied on very modest properties.
What will be interesting to see is how the British government responds if house prices keep rising. Will Gordon Brown raise the stamp duty thresholds to ensure continued mobility in the UK housing market?
Or will he follow the example of his Irish counterparts and swell his coffers by leaving hard-working tax payers to pay ever larger levies simply to move house?
Sense of deja vu about Abbott investment
Abbott Laboratories, the US medical devices company, has been one of Ireland's longest-standing and reliable foreign direct investors.
The Chicago-based company first arrived in Ireland in 1974 and currently operates six plants across a range of disciplines, largely in the Borders-Midlands-West region where the Government is particularly keen on attracting investment.
Its announcement this week to move into the Donegal town premises of hospital products group Hospira, which is closing down this year with the loss of 560 jobs, was warmly welcomed by politicians, community groups and the media. The $36 million (€30 million) investment will create 155 jobs, supported, as is usual in such cases, by IDA Ireland.
One can only assume that Abbott has been around long enough to pick up some of the country cuteness of the Irish because Hospira was originally part of the company - being spun-off only in the past couple of years - and the jobs that are going with its closure would also have been supported financially by the State agency.
To Current Account, that would seem perilously close to being paid twice over for the same jobs, especially as many of the 155 posts in the new Abbott plant are expected to be filled by redundant Hospira staff.
