Husky buys 98 stations from Suncor December 11, 2009
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Husky plans to re-brand its new Ontario stations by the spring of 2010.(Husky Energy)
Calgary-based Husky Energy Inc. said Thursday it is buying 98 gas stations in Ontario from Suncor Energy Inc.
No price was disclosed.
The deal involves 68 Sunoco branded stations and 30 Petro-Canada branded stations and will increase to 128 Husky’s total number of stations in the province. The company plans to convert the stations to its signage in the spring of 2010.
“It represents an attractive opportunity for our shareholders and further strengthens the company’s strategy of being a fully integrated oil and gas business,” CEO John Lau said in a statement.
Suncor committed to selling the stations under an agreement with the competition commissioner in July as part of its merger with Petro-Canada.
Husky is an integrated energy company with oil and natural gas operations in Canada, the United States, offshore Greenland and Southeast Asia.
Italian police seize masterpieces worth $150M from milk king December 6, 2009
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Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi is pictured at his first trial for fraud in November 2008. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail for market-rigging. The 2003 failure of his dairy empire was Europe’s biggest bankruptcy at the time. (Antonio Calanni/Associated Press)
Tax police in Italy have seized a secret stash of masterpieces, said to be worth $150 million US, from the founder of the collapsed dairy conglomerate Parmalat.
Police in the city of Parma, located about 200 kilometres southeast of Milan, showed the results of their investigation to reporters on Saturday at the headquarters of the milk empire of Calisto Tanzi.
Among the 19 works unearthed were pieces by the likes of Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh and Modigliani.
Tanzi was convicted of market-rigging in 2008 in wake of the 2003 collapse of Parmalat.
Authorities say the executive was largely responsible for what was termed Europe’s biggest bankruptcy at the time. Many investors lost their life savings.
Tanzi was sentenced to 10 years behind bars for fraud. His trial on other charges ? fraudulent bankruptcy ? is underway in Parma.
Earlier this week, Tanzi denied he had a secret art collection.
Police said they tracked down the treasure trove using phone interceptions.
Parma prosecutor Gerardo Laguardia said officials believed at least one of the paintings was about to be sold. “We got lucky. We learned that there were negotiations underway to sell one of the paintings,” said Laguardia.
Tax police say it’s likely all of the paintings were about to be sold.
Police say their phone tapping targeted Tanzi’s son-in-law, Stefano Strini, who is now under investigation for handling the artwork.
They say Strini led them to three apartments in Parma, belonging to friends of the family.
With files from The Associated Press (more…)
Striking Vale miners seek support from customers October 16, 2009
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Striking workers at a Sudbury-area nickel mine are seeking the support of Vale Inco customers in their fight against the miner, a local newspaper says.
On Thursday, two striking United Steelworkers union members met with Vale customers in Sweden, the Sudbury Star reported.
According to the report, the delegation asked the customer, Boliden, to not purchase any copper concentrate from Vale until the strike at the company’s Canadian operations is over.
The meeting came as a shipment of Vale copper made its way from Germany to a Swedish port. Steelworkers held a similar protest at a German port handling the same copper shipment over the weekend, the report says.
Major Swedish union IF Metall arranged the meeting, the report says.
Vale workers in Sudbury have been on strike for three months.
Employees at smaller operations in Port Colborne, Ont., and Voisey’s Bay, N.L., are also on strike. In all, roughly 3,500 Vale workers are on strike.
They’re the first labour stoppages since Brazil-based Companhia Vale do Rio Doce bought the former Inco Ltd. for $19 billion in October 2006.
Employee bonuses tied to the price of nickel are a major cause of the dispute.
Earlier this month, the company moved to reopen some of the Sudbury mine’s operations using non-union labour.
On Friday, International Royalty Corp. and minority partner Altius launched a court challenge against Vale Inco over alleged underpayment of royalties on the sale of nickel concentrates from the Voisey’s Bay mine.
Mill gets $2.5M for upgrade from N.S. government September 22, 2009
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Bowater Mersey Paper Co. Ltd. is getting $2.5 million in funding from the Nova Scotia government to help it begin making book-grade paper.
The funding will be used to help the mill in Brooklyn, N.S., near Liverpool, make modifications necessary to begin producing the paper. The book-grade paper market tends to have more stable demand and pricing.
Bowater Mersey, owned by Montreal-based AbitibiBowater, has about 500 full-time employees at its newsprint mill, sawmill and other operations.
The company is spending more than $7 million on the project, which includes new manufacturing processes, technology and equipment.
Economic and Rural Development is supporting the company’s diversification plan through the Community Development Trust Fund.
“Bowater Mersey is managing through difficult economic times in this industry by finding innovative ways to reduce operating costs, improve productivity, and develop new product lines and markets,” Minister of Economic and Rural Development Percy Paris said in a release.
“The fundamentals of this company are solid and, along with the company, its employees, suppliers, and customers and various governments, we want this mill to continue to be a viable part of our economy and return to higher employment levels as the economy rebounds in the coming months.”
The paper, used mainly in paperback books, requires more demanding standards than those for newsprint.
Last Thursday, AbitibiBowater announced that it will cut production in half at the newsprint operation at the Brooklyn mill, and its 300 employees there will work reduced hours.
Besides the newsprint mill, Bowater Mersey also operates the Oakhill sawmill near Bridgewater, the Mersey Woodlands forest management group and the Brooklyn Power Corporation in Brooklyn, Queens Co.
With files from The Canadian Press (more…)
EnCana benefits from hedges July 24, 2009
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Three-month TSX trading in EnCana
EnCana Corp.’s commodity hedges contributed $900 million US to its cash flow in the second quarter, the company said Thursday.
That helped the company hold the drop in cash flow to 25 per cent in the quarter, compared with a 38 per cent fall in operating profit and an 80 per cent crash in final profit.
Natural gas prices fell 68 per cent year-over-year, to $3.50 per million British thermal units from $10.93 in the second quarter of 2008. But EnCana’s realized price, after hedging, fell just 18 per cent to $6.99.
“In the past year, natural gas prices dropped close to 70 per cent, yet we have continued to meet or exceed our 2009 financial and operating objectives” because of the hedges, Randy Eresman, president and CEO, said in a news release.
After-tax realized and unrealized hedging gains will total about $3 billion by the time the natural gas year ends on Oct. 31, EnCana said.
Second-quarter natural gas and oil production was unchanged from the same quarter a year ago, at 4.6 billion cubic feet equivalent per day.
The company said its cost cutting had already saved more than $900 million.
“Some of those savings, achieved primarily through capital reductions, have been redeployed to other parts of our portfolio, largely to shale gas plays,” Eresman said.
Profit for the three months ended June 30 was $239 million (32 cents a diluted share), down from $1.22 billion ($1.63) a year earlier.
EnCana pipelines in northeastern British Columbia have been the targets of six unsolved bombings in less than a year. A letter to the Dawson Creek Daily News in mid-July warned EnCana to shut down its operations in the area or face more bombs.
The company isn’t leaving the area, spokesman Alan Boras has said.
End of an era as Nortel shares delisted from TSX July 1, 2009
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Nortel Networks’s final demise as a stock market darling came quietly Friday when the former tech giant was delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange on a permanent basis.
The final price: 18.5 cents per common share.
Compare that to 2000, when Nortel dominated Canada’s benchmark stock market with a share price of $124.50 and was valued at $400 billion, with 95,000 employees around the world.
The TSX had announced the delisting earlier in the week in a news release simply titled “Changes in Stock List.” Nortel shares were suspended from trading all of last week and last changed hands on the TSX on June 19.
Business observers worried that Nortel’s demise leaves a gap in Canadian research and development, apart from the concern of losing such a longstanding business icon.
Tyler Chamberlin, an assistant professor who researches the technology industry at the University of Ottawa’s management school, called the end of Nortel’s slow stock-market fall “a very, very sad day for just about everybody in and around this company.”
Nortel peaked under the hand of CEO John Roth, who dramatically restructured the company, turning it from a telephone technology firm to a builder of the internet.
The tech darling’s demise started in October 2000, after global sales began sliding. The situation was further complicated by an accounting scandal that saw the exit of CEO Frank Dunn in April 2004 .
Shares of Nortel were suspended last week in the wake of the Ottawa-based company’s court-supervised restructuring, which includes selling part of its wireless-network business to Nokia Siemens for $650 million US.
Many business analysts agree that selling off the company’s most valuable asset — the wireless business — substantially reduces any chance of a serious restructuring.
“When you sell off the crown jewels,… you know that the game is over,” said Ian Lee, an assistant professor at Carleton University’s business school.
Nortel is also in talks to sell other parts of its business.
Insolvencies up 1.5% in April from March June 7, 2009
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Just over 14,500 Canadian consumers and businesses went bankrupt or sought to renegotiate their debts in April, the Superintendent of Bankruptcy reported Thursday.
That’s up 32.2 per cent from April 2008 and 1.5 per cent from March.
Insolvencies in the past six months
April 14,455
March 14,244
February 12,320
January 10,775
December 10,477
November 11,194
Source: Superintendent of Bankruptcy
The total includes 11,465 bankruptcies and 2,990 proposals. A proposal is an offer to creditors to settle debts under different terms than originally negotiated.
Most of the 14,455 insolvencies, the term the superintendent uses to cover both bankruptcies and proposals, were consumers. Businesses accounted for 637 of the total cases.
The April increase pushed the total insolvencies to 135,927 in the year ending April, up 22.1 per cent from the year ended April 2008.
