IRISH PAY-TV broadcaster Setanta Sports has missed out in the bidding war in the US for the rights to show Uefa Champions League football from the 2009/2010 season.
The rights went to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Soccer Channel, which won a three-way race that also included Disney-owned ESPN, which had owned the rights for more than a decade. Fox recently pinched the same rights for Central and South America from ESPN.
But there could be a silver lining for Setanta, with reports suggesting that Fox might sub-licence some of the rights to the Irish broadcaster.
BUSINESSMAN TOM Roche and his family earned a dividend of €6.2 million last year from Woodford Capital, an investment vehicle that owns their near 40 per cent stake in waste and utility group NTR.
This emerges in accounts just filed for the group. Woodford Capital’s net assets at the end of May last year stood at €55.1 million.
GIVEN THE fallout from the global financial crisis, you might have thought we’d seen the back of 100 per cent mortgages. Not so, it seems.
We know of an AIB staff member who was recently granted approval for a 100 per cent mortgage for an apartment in Dublin. You can be sure there are other cases, too.
A spokesman for AIB said the bank never offered this product “over the counter”, with its maximum set at a 92 per cent loan-to-value rate.
He added that AIB did make it available to “young professionals” who “could demonstrate” that their earnings would rise substantially over a three- to five-year period. “It’s very much on a case-by-case basis,” he said.
Property values might have collapsed in the past year, but it still seems like madness to be doling out 100 per cent mortgages in the current economic climate, regardless of future potential earnings.
