SMP.L Share News (SMP)

LONDON (Alliance News) - The following is a summary of top news stories Monday.
----------
COMPANIES
----------
The Conservative party on Sunday confirmed plans to allow retail investors to buy up to GBP4 billion worth of shares in Lloyds Banking Group if the party wins the country's upcoming general election. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Chancellor George Osborne said the retail offer would be launched within one year of the election and include a loyalty bonus of one share for every ten held for a year to encourage people to adopt a long-term approach to ownership. Various UK press reports said the shares would be sold at discounted market prices.
----------
HSBC Holdings is renewing its efforts to simplify and shrink its operations by speeding up plans to withdraw from certain emerging markets, according to a Financial Times report. The FT report, which cited people close to the bank, said that HSBC's new strategy will result in an exit from retail banking in Brazil and Turkey, as well as from other operations that aren't performing to a level deemed adequate. The group's investment banking arm, known as global banking and markets, also faces cuts, according to the report.
----------
St Modwen Properties has appointed British Land Financial Controller Robert Hudson as its next finance director, and he's set to start by October. Hudson, aged 41, is a chartered accountant who began his career with PricewaterhouseCoopers before moving to Experian PLC in 2000 where he held a number of senior financial roles, including global finance director of its Decision Analytics business and UK finance director. St. Modwen's current finance director, Mike Dunn, had announced in December that he would leave the property company on May 31.
----------
Steel maker Evraz said its crude steel and steel products output was flat in the first quarter of 2015 compared with the previous quarter, meaning output was slightly up on the year-earlier period, while it will return USD336.2 million to shareholders after its share tender ended. Consolidated crude steel output was stable on the quarter at 3.9 million tonnes a quarter, with its Russian steel mills running at full capacity.
----------
Petrofac said it will book a further GBP130 million pretax loss on its Laggan-Tormore gas plant project on Shetland in the UK, blaming weather-related delays, an issue with a sub-contractor, lower worker productivity and the requirement for more work than it had previously expected. The oil and gas services company had booked a USD230 million loss on the project in its 2014 results and had said it expected that it wouldn't have to book any further losses over the remainder of the contract, which it expected to complete in the third quarter of 2015. However, as activity ramped up in March and April, it became clear that the project was going to require more work than it had previously expected, it said.
----------
AVEVA Group said it expects its results for the financial year that ended March 31 to be in line with market expectations.
----------
LondonMetric Property said it has exchanged contracts on the sale of its 170,000 square foot Travis Perkins distribution facility in Brackmills, Northamptonshire to CBRE Global Investors for GBP14.4 million, reflecting a net initial yield of 5.5%. The property was bought in November 2013 for GBP9.0 million with four months remaining on the lease.
----------
International Public Partnerships said it has acquired an additional 40% investment in the Lewisham Building Schools for the Future project, increasing its overall exposure to between 40% and 50% in the underlying project assets. The company said it will invest GBP14.3 million
----------
MARKETS
----------
London's main indices are trading higher led by mining and and banking stocks as China's central bank stimulus measures announced on Sunday are helping European stock markets to recover some of their losses suffered on Friday.
----------
FTSE 100: up 0.7% at 7,046.65
FTSE 250: up 0.1% at 17,585.15
AIM ALL-SHARE: flat at 749.39
----------
GBP: down at USD1.4923
EUR: down at USD1.0748

GOLD: flat at USD1204.38 per ounce
OIL (Brent): down at USD63.74 a barrel

(changes since end of previous GMT day)
----------
ECONOMICS AND GENERAL
----------
The Liberal Democrats moved to the centre of the election campaign, as one MP in the party ruled out the possibility of another coalition deal with the Conservatives, but the party became the object of wooing from the Labour Party over a potential deal. The parties also found some ground for agreement on a clampdown on tax avoidance, as the City of London gave its backing to Labour's non-domicile proposals and a warning was issued by Tesco over the threat a British exit from the European Union poses to the business community. Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George has claimed there will be no repeat of the coalition agreement sealed between the Lib Dems and the Tories in 2010, claiming that the Tories do not want a deal and adding he is sure his party does not either.
----------
Polling ahead of the UK General Election remained mixed over the weekend, with the latest Opinium poll giving the Conservatives a four-point lead but a YouGov poll putting Labour ahead by three points and an ICM poll putting the parties neck-and-neck.
----------
The average asking price for a house in the UK was up 1.6% on month in April, property tracking website Rightmove said on Monday, coming in at a record GBP286,133. That follows the 1.0% increase in March. On a yearly basis, house prices climbed 4.7%, slowing from 5.4% in the previous month. The website cited a shortage of new home building as one of the main reasons for the spike in prices.
----------
China's reserve requirement ratio reduction by 100 basis points announced Sunday was the biggest such cut since the financial crisis. The People's Bank of China lowered the amount set aside by banks as reserves to 18.5% effective Monday. This was the second reduction this year, an action taken after the economy logged its weakest growth in six years. The central bank last lowered the ratio by 0.5 percentage points in February, which was the first reduction since May 2012. The latest move was intended to make available more funds for banks for lending and to divert funds to productive sectors.
----------
Greek officials are pulling out all the stops in an effort to borrow EUR15 billion to avoid default, with recent feelers out to China and Russia, according to Greek media reports Saturday. Weekly newspaper Karfi cited government officials saying that the country is hoping China will provide it with a EUR10 billion loan, in the form of a prepayment for future use of the port of Piraeus and as an advance on its investment into Greece's railway operator. The country is also hoping for an additional EUR3-5 billion from Russia, according to the weekly Agora, also quoting officials. That would serve as an advance payment for fees linked to a planned gas pipeline dubbed Turkish Stream. The pipeline would bring Russian gas to the Greek-Turkish border.
----------
Germany's producer prices declined at a faster-than-expected pace in March, figures from Destatis showed. The producer price index fell 1.7% year-over-year in March, surpassing economists' expectations for a 1.6% decrease. In February, prices had fallen 2.1%. Producer prices have been falling since August 2013.
----------
The US Federal Reserve can reduce the risk of financial instability from expected interest rate hikes in the coming months by clearly communicating its monetary policy plans, the International Monetary Fund's key policy committee said. The US central bank has already signalled that it might start tightening monetary policy as early as June, after keeping its benchmark interest rate at an unprecedented near-zero since December 2008. The committee, which steers the Washington-based IMF's policies, said in a statement Saturday that "careful calibration and effective communication of policy normalization is needed" to ease potential shocks to the financial system, currency fluctuations and large swings in investment flows to fast-growing developing economies.
----------
Copyright 2015 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.