Mulberry mulling amid increased Frasers offer, easyJet appoints new CFO

Stocks to watch

Luxury handbag maker Mulberry on Monday said it was considering its position after major shareholder Challice said it had no intention of selling its 56% stake to Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group despite an increased bid for the company. The statement came after Frasers, which already holds 37% of Mulberry, upped its offer for the rest of the firm to 150p a share from 130p late on Friday after an earlier £83m bid was rejected by the company earlier this month.

EasyJet has announced that it is appointing the chief financial officer European freight operator Lineas as the new head of its finance function, as current CFO Kenton Jarvis gets ready to move into the chief executive role early next year. Jan De Raeymaeker, who prior to Lineas was the CFO of Brussels Airlines, will join the board on 20 January.

PageGroup reported a 13.5% drop in third-quarter gross profit on Monday, to £201.4m, with challenging market conditions and declining confidence affecting client and candidate decision-making across all regions. The FTSE 250 recruiter said in an update that Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) saw a 15.1% decline in gross profit, while the UK was down 13.5%, and Asia-Pacific suffered the largest drop at 16.8%, driven by a 25% fall in Greater China. Despite the tough environment, it maintained a net cash position of £93m, with the board expecting full-year operating profit to align with market consensus of £58m.

Newspaper round-up

Spanish shipbuilding firm Navantia is in exclusive negotiations to buy Harland & Wolff, the owner of the Belfast shipyard that built the Titanic, in a deal that could rescue up to 1,000 jobs. It is understood the group could take control of the group’s four yards – in Belfast; Appledore, Devon; Arnish on the Isle of Lewis; and Methil, Fife – as early as next month. – Guardian

The Post Office has recently explored resuming the practice of taking branch owner-operators to court, as mounting losses from shortfalls in its network of 11,500 outlets hit £12m a year. During the Horizon IT scandal more than 900 operators were wrongly prosecuted over discrepancies caused by the faulty accounting software, many of them brought privately by the Post Office, a practice it stopped in 2015 and has promised not to restart. – Guardian

Top rate taxpayers now pay more than two fifths of all income tax, according to official data that lays bare how reliant Britain is on just 1m workers. Taxpayers subject to the 45p rate are expected to contribute £124bn to the Treasury’s coffers this year, according to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) data. This is more than is raised from corporation tax, as well as the amount that the Treasury receives annually from fuel duties, council tax and business rates combined. – Telegraph

Red tape brought in by regulators after the financial crisis to protect consumers has gone too far and is poorly targeted, a bank boss has warned. The chief executive of Saxo UK said the growing regulatory burden on banks since the crash has come with “significant costs” that harm competition. Andrew Bresler, who heads up the UK subsidiary of Danish-headquartered Saxo Bank, said: “If I think about how many people pre-financial crisis versus post-financial crisis I would need, there are probably 30pc to 40pc more people to meet the regulatory requirements. That’s a lot more people than beforehand. – Telegraph

The UK’s largest private pension fund has pushed back on government proposals to require more investment in domestic assets, amid concerns that the policy could disadvantage pensioners. The Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) has warned the Treasury that forcing schemes to increase allocations forUK assets would be “wholly inconsistent” with trustees’ duties to provide the best outcomes for pension savers. – The Times

US close

Wall Street stocks were in the green at the close of trading on Friday as market participants digested quarterly earnings reports from some of the biggest names in US banking and better-than-expected inflation data.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.97% at 42,863.86p, while the S&P 500 advanced 0.61% to 5,815.03 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 0.33% firmer at 18,342.94.

The Dow closed 409.74 points higher on Friday, easily reversing losses recorded in the previous session as last month's consumer price index led to fears that inflation hasn't quite cooled off as initially hoped.

However, Friday's producer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics eased some of those fears as it revealed PPI was flat month-on-month and up 1.8% on an annualised basis.

Excluding volatile food and energy costs, the so-called core reading was 0.2% higher month-on-month.