Cineworld to pay out dissenting Regal shareholders, Volution completes ERI takeover

Stocks to watch

Cineworld said it would pay $170m of a judgement to dissenting shareholders of Regal Entertainment Group after the company’s takeover of the movie theatre chain in 2018. A further $92m will be placed into an escrow account to be available to Cineworld as additional liquidity “under certain circumstances”. The funds in the escrow account will be paid to the dissenting shareholders no later than 31 March 2022.

Air quality technology company Volution Group has completed the acquisition of heat exchanger cell manufacturer Energy Recovery Industries (ERI), it announced on Friday. The FTSE 250 firm said initial consideration for the acquisition was €23.4m (£19.99m) on a debt-free, cash-free basis, with a further contingent cash consideration of up to €12.4m based on stretching targets for the financial results in the year ending 31 December 2023.

Newspaper round-up

Ikea is poised to buy Topshop’s former flagship store on London’s Oxford Street, once the jewel in Sir Philip Green’s retail empire, for an estimated £385m, creating a new London home for the Swedish furniture brand. The deal to buy the long leasehold on the building, which includes the now-vacant 100,000 sq ft Topshop outlet as well as a NikeTown store and a shop for footwear brand Vans, is expected to complete the sell off of the assets of Green’s Arcadia Group empire which collapsed into administration in November last year. - Guardian

Shoppers can expect to pay more for their pasta in coming months amid shortages of its key ingredient following a disastrous growing season. A scramble for durum wheat has pushed the price up nearly 90% this summer after drought and soaring temperatures hit farms in Canada, one of the biggest producers. - Guardian

Ireland has been forced to freeze power exports to the UK to prevent a shortage which could have sparked blackouts as surging energy prices continue to cause chaos across Europe. A toxic combination of low wind speeds and a severe squeeze on the supply of natural gas sent power costs jumping tenfold on the British mainland on Thursday to as much as £2,300 per megawatt-hour, a new record high. - Telegraph

Goldman Sachs will scrap social distancing in its London office from Monday as part of its drive to get more staff to return. The bank also will stop the free canteen food that it has been offering staff throughout the pandemic in an effort to boost the recovery of local cafés and restaurants, Richard Gnodde, its international chief executive, said. - The Times

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has confirmed the departures of four senior board members, including its chief executive, after the release of a critical independent report, which suggested that the crisis-hit body should apologise to the non-executive directors it sacked two years ago. The institution said that Sean Tompkins, 55, the chief executive who received £1.1 million in pay, including bonuses, from 2017 to 2019, would not receive a pay-off after his exit.- The Times

US close

Wall Street closed lower on Thursday as some better than expected jobless claims data was offset by concerns surrounding a rise in new cases of Covid-19.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.43% at 34,879.38, while the S&P 500 was 0.46% weaker at 4,493.28 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 0.25% softer at 15,248.25.

The Dow closed 151.69 points lower on Thursday, extending losses recorded in the previous session after the Labor Department's job openings and labor turnover survey revealed that openings outnumbered the unemployed by more than 2.0m in July.

Thursday's primary focus was the jobless claims report, with first-time weekly unemployment claims undershooting market forecasts by a wide margin in the seven days ended 4 September. According to the Department of Labor, in seasonally adjusted terms, initial unemployment claims dropped by 35,000 to 310,000. Economists were expecting to see initial claims slip from 340,000 to 335,000.

The four-week moving average of initial claims, which aims to smooth out the variations in the data from one week to the next, declined by 16,750 to 339,500, while secondary unemployment claims, those referencing the week finished on 28 August, fell by 22,000 to approximately 2.78m.