A London-listed advertising technology provider has caved into shareholder pressure and abandoned plans to recalibrate a multimillion-pound executive pay scheme.
Sky News has learnt that Tremor International has withdrawn two resolutions that were scheduled to be voted on at its annual meeting on Wednesday.
They related to a repricing of share options and an increase in the amount of stock that could be awarded under the company’s equity compensation plans.
Leading shareholders are understood to have warned Tremor against proceeding with the plans after a year in which its shares have slumped by more than 40%.
One source close to the company confirmed that the two resolutions would almost certainly have been defeated given the level of investor unrest at the proposals.
Tremor, which is headquartered in Israel, recently bought Amobee, a California-based peer, for $239m.
Although the transaction is expected to be highly earnings-accretive, Tremor’s shares have performed disappointingly.
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In November last year, Sky News revealed that leading investors were urging its board to hold talks with potential buyers amid frustration at its sluggish stock price performance.
The company’s board members include Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News UK, publisher of The Sun and The Times newspapers.
The cost of government borrowing has jumped, while UK stocks and the pound are up, as markets digest the news of billions in borrowing and tax rises announced in the budget.
While there was no panic, there had been concern about the scale of borrowing and changes to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules.
At the market open on Friday, the interest rate on government borrowing stood at 4.476% on its 10-year bonds – the benchmark for state borrowing costs.
It’s down from the high of yesterday afternoon – 4.525% – but a solid upward tick.
The pound also rose to buy $1.29 or €1.1873 after yesterday experiencing the biggest two-day fall in trade-weighted sterling in 18 months.
On the stock market front, the benchmark index, the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 list of most valuable companies was up 0.36%.
The larger and more UK-focused FTSE 250 also went up by 0.1%.
While there was a definite reaction to the budget, uniquely impacting UK borrowing costs, the response is far smaller than after the UK mini-budget.
Many forces are affecting markets with the upcoming US election on a knife edge and interest rate decisions in both the UK and the US coming on Thursday.
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What you need to know is this. The budget has not gone down well in financial markets. Indeed, it’s gone down about as badly as any budget in recent years, save for Liz Truss’s mini-budget.
The pound is weaker. Government bond yields (essentially, the interest rate the exchequer pays on its debt) have gone up.
That’s precisely the opposite market reaction to the one chancellors like to see after they commend their fiscal statements to the house.
In hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised.
After all, the new government just committed itself to considerably more borrowing than its predecessors – about £140bn more borrowing in the coming years. And that money has to be borrowed from someone – namely, financial markets.
But those financial markets are now reassessing how keen they are to lend to the UK.
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The upshot is that the pound has fallen quite sharply (the biggest two-day fall in trade-weighted sterling in 18 months) and gilt yields – the interest rate paid by the government – have risen quite sharply.
This was all beginning to crystallise shortly after the budget speech, with yields beginning to rise and the pound beginning to weaken, the moment investors and economists got their hands on the budget documentation.
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Chancellor challenged over gilt yield spike
But the falls in the pound and the rises in the bond yields accelerated today.
This is not, to be absolutely clear, the kind of response any chancellor wants to see after a budget – let alone their first budget in office.
Indeed, I can’t remember another budget which saw as hostile a market response as this one in many years – save for one.
That exception is, of course, the Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng mini-budget of 2022. And here is where you’ll find the silver lining for Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
The rises in gilt yields and falls in sterling in recent hours and days are still far shy of what took place in the run up and aftermath of the mini-budget. This does not yet feel like a crisis moment for UK markets.
But nor is it anything like good news for the government. In fact, it’s pretty awful. Because higher borrowing rates for UK debt mean it (well, us) will end up paying considerably more to service our debt in the coming years.
And that debt is about to balloon dramatically because of the plans laid down by the chancellor this week.
And this is where things get particularly sticky for Ms Reeves.
In that budget documentation, the Office for Budget Responsibility said the chancellor could afford to see those gilt yields rise by about 1.3 percentage points, but then when they exceeded this level, the so-called “headroom” she had against her fiscal rules would evaporate.
In other words, she’d break those rules – which, recall, are considerably less strict than the ones she inherited from Jeremy Hunt.
Which raises the question: where are those gilt yields right now? How close are they to the danger zone where the chancellor ends up breaking her rules?
Short answer: worryingly close. Because, right now, the yield on five-year government debt (which is the maturity the OBR focuses on most) is more than halfway towards that danger zone – only 56 basis points away from hitting the point where debt interest costs eat up any leeway the chancellor has to avoid breaking her rules.
Now, we are not in crisis territory yet. Nor can every move in currencies and bonds be attributed to this budget.
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Markets are volatile right now. There’s lots going on: a US election next week and a Bank of England decision on interest rates next week.
The chancellor could get lucky. Gilt yields could settle in the coming days. But, right now, the UK, with its high level of public and private debt, with its new government which has just pledged to borrow many billions more in the coming years, is being closely scrutinised by the “bond vigilantes”.
The football financier Keith Harris is spearheading a bid to buy a 45% stake in the Premier League football club Crystal Palace in a deal that could be worth close to £200m.
Sky News has learnt that Mr Harris is advising a group of businessmen including Zechariah Janjua and Navshir Jaffer on an offer to acquire the shareholding from Eagle Football, a vehicle created by American businessman John Textor and owner of a number of major clubs around the world.
Sources said on Thursday that the consortium advised by Mr Harris was a leading contender to buy the stake in the Eagles, although they cautioned that at least one, and possibly two, other parties were also in discussions with Mr Textor.
Mr Harris’s group, which would probably execute its deal through a recently established corporate vehicle called Sportbank, may also require financing from other investors as part of its plans, the sources added.
Eagle Football is said to be hopeful that a deal to offload its Crystal Palace shareholding would value the club, which recorded its first win of the Premier League campaign against Tottenham Hotspur last weekend, at more than £400m.
Stanley Tang, one of the founders of the US-based food delivery company DoorDash, is also understood to have expressed an interest in acquiring Eagle Football’s stake in Crystal Palace.
A spokesman for Mr Tang denied that he was in discussions to buy Eagle Football’s Crystal Palace stake.
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Mr Textor, who declined to comment, is keen to own a controlling interest in a club in English football’s top flight, and came close to securing a deal to buy Everton during the summer.
Instead, Everton’s long-standing owner agreed a transaction with Dan Friedkin, the owner of Italian Serie A side AS Roma.
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Eagle Football’s other footballing interests include Olympique Lyonnais in France, Botafogo, which currently leads Brazil’s top division, and RWD Molenbeek in Belgium.
This week, the holding company issued a statement confirming that it is preparing to file confidentially with US regulators ahead of a public listing in the first quarter of next year.
Sky News revealed in August that Eagle Football had lined up Stifel and TD Cowen, the investment banks, to work on the initial public offering (IPO).
The stake in Crystal Palace is being sold by The Raine Group, which has been involved in recent deals involving Chelsea and Manchester United.
In its statement this week, Eagle Football said it would seek $100m from the sale of shares in the company ahead of an IPO, as well as a further $500m as part of the flotation itself.
It also wants to raise “up to $500m to retire existing senior debt, to be achieved through the sale of its interest in Crystal Palace Football Club and, possibly, the placement of long-term senior notes”.
Collectively, these moves are expected to help Mr Textor achieve an enterprise value for Eagle Football of around $2.3bn (£1.74bn), they said.
In the past, Mr Textor has spoken about his belief that public ownership of football teams provides fans with greater transparency about the running of their clubs.
He has described this as the democratisation of ownership – an issue set to face greater scrutiny now that a bill on football regulation has been reintroduced to parliament by the new Labour government.
Some clubs with listed shares, including Manchester United, have, however, endured a torrid relationship with supporters, partly as a result of their voting rights being controlled by a single dominant shareholder.