Sunday newspaper round-up: Rentokil, Ukraine, Crowdstrike

21st Jul 2024 21:41

(Sharecast News) - BT's former chief executive officer, Philip Jansen, is plotting to takeover Rentokil Initial with the help of private equity. As part of the acquisition, Jansen would take over as executive chairman. In particular, the corporate dealmaker and his financial supporters would focus on making Rentokil's 2022 purchase of US peer Terminix work. In a second phase, the company would move on to acquiring other US companies in the same sector. - Sunday Times

Asset manager Columbia Threadneedle Investments is forecasting that UK families' energy bills are set to rise by £194 a year as the energy price cap jumps from £1,568 to £1,762 as a result of the war in Ukraine. The prediction from Columbia's chief economist, Steven Bell, was based on the recent jump in energy future contracts as a result of the fact that Ukraine was losing the war. Bell said there was concern that storage and transhipment facilities in Ukraine might come under threat. - Sunday Telegraph

Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity outfit behind the global IT outage that hit companies around the world, said on Sunday that it had deployed a fix for the "defect" that had triggered the crisis. However, according to the British Medical Association, it will take time to clear the backlog that resulted at NHS. Wizz Air for its part reported that its systems were up and running but added that it would take "some time" for flight schedules to "return to normal". - Guardian

Bonds issued by TalkTalk fell sharply during the previous week due to concern that the broadband provider might find it difficult to refinance over £1bn of debt maturing over the next seven months. The bonds' lost 10p in price to end the week at 80p in the pound due to a lack of a substantive update on its talks for a capital injection from Macquarie. - The Sunday Times