Sunday newspaper round-up: Jaguar Land Rover, Huawei, Spanish elections, Gatwick diversions
Struggling Jaguar Land Rover is considering a bid for the minicab operator Addison Lee as it attempts to navigate the challenge to car ownership from Uber and driverless vehicles.
Addison Lee’s owner, US private equity firm Carlyle Group, has hired Bank of America and Rothschild to try to sell the business with a target price of between £300m and £500m.
Prospective bidders are examining Addison Lee’s financial details before deciding on whether to submit an offer. JLR is among other car manufacturers, tech players and private equity firms looking at whether to bid, according to sources close to the process. - The Sunday Telegraph
Sir Charles Dunstone is attempting to raise £1bn from international investors to bankroll a new ultra-fast broadband network to challenge BT.
The billionaire founder of Carphone Warehouse is backing plans to raise £400m in equity and £600m in debt for FibreNation, an infrastructure venture by his broadband operator TalkTalk.
City sources said a formal process is due to begin in the next few weeks and that dozens of funds had expressed interest. - The Sunday Telegraph
Arcadia has called on a lender to underpin its supply chain as Sir Philip Green attempts a restructuring of his empire, starting as soon as this week.
HSBC has agreed to act as a guarantor to Arcadia, which has been forced to pay suppliers in advance since credit insurers withdrew support earlier this year. Both parties declined to comment on the deal.
The retailer, which owns Topshop, Miss Selfridge, Wallis and Dorothy Perkins, is still working on persuading landlords to back its plans for store closures and rent cuts under a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA), a form of financial restructuring. - The Sunday Telegraph
Anti-fracking campaigners have welcomed the resignation of the government’s shale gas commissioner, who quit in frustration at “ridiculous” regulations limiting drillers from causing earth tremors, which she claimed were hobbling the industry.
Natascha Engel stood down at the weekend after just six months in the post and accused ministers of being too heavily influenced by climate change campaigners such as the Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg and anti-fracking protesters. - The Observer
Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Evening Standard and the Independent, is in talks to offload his loss-making London Live TV station.
Lebedev and his father, Alexander, won the hotly contested battle for the licence for the capital’s first dedicated TV channel six years ago, the crown jewel of the government’s plan to launch dozens of local TV channels across the UK. - The Observer
China’s ambassador to the UK has urged the government to ignore external pressure over a politically and diplomatically charged decision to involve the Chinese firm Huawei in building the 5G communications network.
In China’s first official comments on the row, Beijing’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, urged the UK to make the “right decision independently” over the suppliers for the new network.
Huawei is at the centre of a Whitehall leak inquiry after details emerged of a National Security Council (NSC) meeting during which Theresa May approved giving Huawei a limited role supplying the 5G system. - The Observer
Wall Street is going vegan. At some point in the next four weeks, Beyond Meat, a pioneering plant-based meat alternative startup, will debut on Wall Street at a valuation of about $1.2bn. And in the meantime its rivals are cutting deals with some of the biggest names in food.
Beyond Meat is the latest in a series of “unicorns” – private companies valued at over $1bn – to go public. And this one is edible.
The company, based in El Segundo, California, was founded 10 years ago by tech entrepreneur Ethan Brown. It found early backing from legendary Silicon Valley financiers Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – and later from Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio – before it brought its first product, a chicken-free “chicken”, to market in 2013.
Now the company is going public, at a pivotal moment for meat-like products created from plant-based protein, mainly yellow peas, which are being used to create a new wave of burgers (which actually “bleed” with beet juice), together with poultry and sausage substitutes that taste far closer to the real thing than their predecessors. - The Observer
Spain’s political future was on a knife edge on Sunday night as polls closed and counting began in a general election marked by the emotive issue of Catalan separatism and the emergence of hard-Right party Vox.
High turnout figures boosted expectations that the incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party (PSOE) would win, albeit falling far short of a majority.
Two hours before polls closed, 60.7% of voters had cast their ballots, compared to 51.2% at the same point in the previous general elections in 2016. The most recent PSOE general election win, in 2008, came the last time the final turnout figure topped 70%. - The Sunday Telegraph
Three flights have been diverted to Stansted Airport following reports of a possible drone sighting at Gatwick Airport.
The two easyJet flights - one from Barcelona and one from Amsterdam - both initially got sent to Stansted before taking off again to land at Gatwick. A British Airways flight from Heraklion was also diverted.
All three passenger planes eventually landed at Gatwick more than 90 minutes after their scheduled arrival time. - The Sunday Telegraph