Greensill flop shows advice has a price
After the implosion of the Australian lender, star-studded boards may come to be seen as a giant red flag for investors
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Poor old David Cameron. As if being the face of luxury garden sheds wasn’t embarrassing enough, the former Prime Minister is now the pin-up star of the biggest meltdown in global finance.
Still, at least he’s not embarked on a shameless “portfolio career” like George Osborne, taking any job he can get. Nor has Cameron got mega-rich jetting round the world and occasionally helping to prop up dictators like his predecessor’s predecessor “Teflon Tony”.
Billionaire Livingstone brothers hit the jackpot with Evolution Gaming gamble
A stake in a Swedish gambling business now accounts for almost half of the brothers’ net worth
Evolution Gaming share price has risen 200pc since the start of the pandemic
They are among Britain’s most secretive billionaires, with a portfolio that spans some of the world’s most lavish properties.
Over the past 30 years Ian and Richard Livingstone have quietly amassed a multibillion-pound empire that includes the West Palm Beach Marriott hotel in Florida and Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire country house turned hotel where John Profumo met Christine Keeler.
But their shrewdest bet by far is a very different kind of investment.
London’s office market pulls back from the brink
The shift to remote work fails to extinguish foreign demand for prime sites in the capital
24 January 2021 • 6:00pm
With the UK now well into its third lockdown, investors and landlords in Britain’s commercial property market are growing increasingly twitchy.
It’s not just the worries over late rental payments and the lack of workers actually using prime office space as millions of people continue to work from home. For many, the astonishingly rapid changes in market conditions over the past 12 months has come as a deep shock to the system.
More than 16,000 buyers could miss out on stamp duty savings because Covid has forced developers to slow down their building projects.
Customers are on the brink of losing savings worth up to £15,000 due to coronavirus delays which are often as long as two months, according to the National Federation of Builders trade body (NFB). Estate agents have warned of some projects running 10 months behind schedule.
Some 8,000 new-build house sales complete each month, according to the NFB - so an average two-month hopd-up means more than 16,000 buyers could miss the stamp duty holiday cut-off date on March 31.
Rico Wojtulewicz of the NFB said working through the pandemic Covid-19 has affected the ability for many to complete on time and take advantage of the tax saving.
Our Income Portfolio was drastically changed last year in response to the pandemic. Let’s assess how much good those changes have done us.
The biggest shake-up was in April, when we sold the five individual shares that had cut their dividends in response to the virus, or seemed likely to, and replaced them with five investment trusts.
In terms of missed opportunity for capital gains the changes were disastrous: the share prices of all five of the holdings sold have soared (Ten Entertainment by 14.4pc, ULS Technology by 82.7pc, Renew Holdings by 28.6pc, OneSavings Bank by 101pc and Crest Nicholson by 32.8pc).