Shaftesbury Capital secures £200m loan, Tritax EuroBox agrees two new leases
London open
The FTSE 100 is expected to open 17 points lower on Monday, having closed down 1.24% on Friday at 7,524.16.
Stocks to watch
Shaftesbury Capital announced a new 10-year loan of £200m from Aviva Investors on Monday, using a portfolio of assets within the Carnaby estate as collateral. The FTSE 100 firm said the loan proceeds would partly repay a £576m unsecured loan drawn in April, extending its weighted average maturity of debt to five years and reducing the weighted average cost of debt to 4.2%, ultimately reaching an effective cash cost of 3.3%.
Tritax EuroBox said it had agreed two new leases in Italy and Germany, securing €1.3m in rent. The company on Monday said it had leased a unit in the Settimino development outside Turin, Italy and a new seven-year lease for a unit in Bochum, Germany.
Newspaper round-up
New spending figures have laid bare the damage inflicted on the retail sector’s competitiveness by the government’s post-Brexit tourist tax. After the introduction of VAT on overseas spending, shops in London are struggling to capitalise on a post-Covid uplift in travel as the higher duty encourages visitors to divert to Paris and other European cities. - The Times
The Army is struggling to hire cyber security experts amid intense competition from business, its recruitment chief has admitted. Richard Holroyd, managing director of Defence and Security at Capita, which handles recruitment for the Armed Forces, said it was having difficulty attracting candidates given the wealth of jobs on offer. - Telegraph
The cost of some basic food items such as cheese, butter and bread has soared by more than 30% in the last two years, forcing poorer households to “make desperate choices between keeping up with their bill payments or putting food on the table,” campaigners have said. Food price inflation has slowed in recent months, but costs remain much higher than they were two years ago, disproportionately affecting low-income households, according to research by consumer body Which? shared exclusively with the Guardian. - Guardian
Britain is missing out on four fifths of the benefits of technological innovation because it does not recognise the value of manufacturing, a new government adviser has warned. Scott White, the chief executive of Pragmatic, a Cambridge-based semiconductor business, said Britain had “suffered” over the past few decades because it had not recognised the value of the production process. - The Times
Consumer confidence continues to decline as soaring mortgage rates hit household finances. Confidence, which had been improving since the aftermath of the mini-Budget, slid for the second month in a row in July, according to polling by YouGov and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr). - Telegraph
About 3.9m working days have been lost to industrial action in the past year, more than at any point since the 1980s, according to a new analysis. The Resolution Foundation, which focuses its research on low- to middle-income households, said many of the strikes were “fuelled” by anger among public sector workers over real-terms pay declines, which amounted to an average cut of more than 9% since 2021, adjusted for inflation. - Guardian
US close
Stocks on Wall Street closed in a mixed state on Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 0.3% at 35,281.40.
The S&P 500 was meanwhile down 0.11% at 4,464.05, and the Nasdaq Composite lost 0.68% to settle at 13,644.85.