Businessman Dermot Desmond has put his hand in his pocket again to help out Canadian prospector Mountain Province Diamonds, writes Mark Paul. Desmond, the largest shareholder in the company, has agreed to buy US$50 million worth of diamonds from the business on top of $50 million he agreed to purchase in June.*
As meat plants continue to feel the heat over spike in coronavirus cases, Barry O'Halloran examines the industry and some of the changes it is under pressure to make, even as processors look to add more workers to their operations.
Building materials giant CRH says it will slow its normal pace of deal-making as it copes with the uncertain fallout from Covid-19 and wrestles with a business that saw profits slide 28 per cent in the first half of the year. Barry listened to what chief executive Albert Manifold had to say.
And Barry also has details of a new acquisition for insulation specialist Kingspan ahead of its interim results statement this morning. The Cavan group has acquired a Slovenian business that makes roofs and facades.
Figures from the CSO show that net inward migration to the State dropped 14.2 per cent last year, but the 28,900 returning Irish nationals was the highest number coming back since 2007. Charlie Taylor delves into the numbers..
For those who have come back, repeated mini-lockdowns and the shaming of transgressors does little to bring us forward in our fight against coronavirus, argued Mark Paul in Caveat. He notes that our medical and political establishment seems ambivalent about the efficacy of mass testing but cautions: remember, it wasn't so long ago that they were ambivalent about wearing masks.
Still on the fun market, Airbnb has announced a global ban on parties and events listed on its platform in a bid to comply with Covid-19 health protocols.
In the US, companies are feeling the heat after awarding top executives multimillion-dollar “retention” bonuses just before declaring bankruptcy, angering creditors who claim the payments are rewards for failure.
“It’s regulatory evasion. I don’t like regulatory evasion,” said Jared Ellias, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. “It goes to a governance system that is really broken.”
The claims come as new figures show there was a resurgence in new jobless claims last week in the US even as analysts had expected further improvement in the numbers.
Finally, a new international study analysing the behaviour of CEOs found that about 17 per cent of them were unsuited to the companies they lead. Olive Keogh examines why.
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* This article was edited on August 25th to correct a factual error.
