AstraZeneca offloads European rights to hypertension drug, Wood Group signs deal with Sakhalin Energy Investment Co

London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open 37 points higher on Monday, after closing up 0.46% at 7,470.71 on Friday.

Stocks to watch

AstraZeneca has sold the European rights to a hypertension and angina treatment for a sum of $300m plus royalties and a percentage of sales. The FTSE 100 drug group will manufacture and supply the medicines to Italian cardiovascular drugs specialist Recordati under a supply agreement, which will see Astra receive an initial double-digit percentage of sales.

Wood Group said it had signed a technical support services contract with Sakhalin Energy Investment Company, an operator of Sakhalin-2, one of the world’s largest integrated oil and gas projects, for an undisclosed sum. The new contract adds brownfield drilling upgrade services to operations Wood Group already supplies.

Listed infrastructure investment firm HICL Infrastructure Company announced on Monday that it has completed the acquisition of a 36.6% equity interest in the various entities that comprise the Affinity Water Group, including the regulated entity, Affinity Water Limited. The FTSE 250 company had initially announced the details of the transaction on 2 May. HICL also revealed it was in “advanced discussions” to sell down a £25m portion of the investment to a “small group of co-investors”, comprising UK local authority pension funds.

Newspaper round-up

Britain has “no time to waste” in Brexit talks, Theresa May will warn as she says formal negotiations about leaving the European Union will start just 11 days after the election. The Prime Minister will tell supporters in Wales - which voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union at the referendum – not to risk letting Jeremy Corbyn lead these talks. - Telegraph

Asking prices for UK homes hit a new record high over the past month as families in search of bigger properties brushed aside uncertainty caused by Brexit and June’s general election. Prices sought by sellers rose 1.2% in the four weeks to 13 May, pushing the average asking price to a fresh peak of £317,281, according to the property website Rightmove. - Guardian

Theresa May’s plans to overhaul social care could be wrecked by poorly performing local authorities, amid further signs that Labour is closing the gap with the Conservatives. Research suggested that people in some parts of the country were struggling to exercise their legal right to defer residential care payments until after their death, with some authorities making it difficult or impossible to strike a deal. - The Times

Investors could face an extra €100 billion bill if Brussels forces the clearing of euro-denominated trades away from London because of Brexit, the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange has warned. The move would cause fragmentation of the €1 trillion market which forms the plumbing behind the global financial system, making it more difficult for clearing houses to offset risk, thereby increasing costs passed on to users including pensioners and savers. - The Times

The boss of the country’s biggest convenience store chain, McColls, has said that he is eyeing a possible takeover of Tesco’s One Stop chain. Industry experts believe that Tesco will have to either offload its One Stop brand or hundreds of Tesco Express shops in order to secure clearance from the UK’s competition regulator for its merger with the wholesaler Booker. - Telegraph

US close

Investors continued to move back into Wall Street stocks following the largest drop since September on Wednesday, despite a spate of mixed company results.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.69% to 20,804.04, alongside gains of 0.68% for the S&P 500 to 2,381.73 and 0.47% in the Nasdaq Composite to 6,083.70.

Outflows from US equities continued for a third week running to 17 May, to the tune of $8.9bn, according to strategists at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch who cited data from EPFR Global.

Front month West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures gained $1.05 to $50.33 a barrel on the ICE, even as Baker Hughes reported that the number of oil rigs operating in the States jumped for an 18th consecutive week, rising by eight to 720.

The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St.Louis said rate-setters' own forecasts for two more interest rate hikes in 2017 might be ‘overly aggressive’.

Judging by the reaction from financial markets to the Fed's last hike, which was the opposite of what he had expected, James Bullard said: "This may suggest that the FOMC’s contemplated policy rate path is overly aggressive relative to actual incoming data on U.S. macroeconomic performance."