INSIDE THE WORLD OF BUSINESS
End of the road for Riada Stockbrokers
THE FAILURE of Royal Bank of Scotland to find a buyer for its cash equities business spells the end of what was formerly Riada Stockbrokers.
RBS, which is 82 per cent owned by the British government, said yesterday it was cutting up to 300 jobs in its capital markets and cash equities units.
The bank said that, after failing to find a buyer, parts of the equity capital markets and cash equities businesses, mostly based in London, would be wound down, affecting 200 to 300 staff.
RBS sold its Hoare Govett corporate banking unit last month.
Riada, acquired by RBS through its ill-fated purchase of Dutch bank ABN Amro, was where many brokers and business figures, including broadcaster George Lee and Bank of Ireland economist Dan McLoughlin, started their careers.
The sole remaining employee of what was previously Riada business at RBS is Damian Roddy, managing director of Irish cash equities within the UK bank’s global banking and markets unit. Roddy is a board member of the Irish Stock Exchange, arising from Riada’s status as one of the owners of the Dublin bourse.
The RBS unit is the broker to Glanbia and was until recently broker to Tullow Oil.
Riada, once one of Dublin’s main stockbroking firms, was set up in 1978.
Illegal takeovers in Ukraine
DOING BUSINESS in Ireland is pretty difficult these days, but at least we’re not Ukraine, where the government actually has a commission charged with combating the illegal takeover of businesses.
The phenomenon has reached an “alarming scale” in recent years, according to the country’s vice prime minister, Andriy Klyuyev, who chairs the commission and is also Ukraine’s minister of economic development and trade.
“Most cases of takeover of business would have been impossible without the involvement of certain officials or judges,” Klyuyev is quoted as saying on the website of the Ukrainian Party of Regions, to which he belongs.
As part of its campaign to seize control of a Kiev shopping centre formerly owned by Seán Quinn’s family, the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC) is running a local PR campaign which it hopes will force the government to take an interest in the scandal.
In its latest press release issued in Kiev, the bank’s PR firm said it was ironic the appeals court there had thrown out IBRC’s challenge to a $45.2 million (€34.3 million) claim against the company that owns the centre, just as Klyuyev’s commission had said it officially recognised the shopping centre debacle as a “raiding attack”.
US embassy cables published in 2010 by the Guardian newspaper in conjunction with WikiLeaks included reports from the embassy in Kiev that concerned the Party of Regions, its links to one of the richest men in Ukraine, billionaire energy tycoon Dmitry Firtash, and concerns that Firtash in turn has links with some controversial Russian figures. Firtash has a range of interests that include the supply of Russian gas to the EU. All of which puts IBRC’s efforts to embarrass the Kiev government into ensuring that its legal rights are respected in context.
