London midday: Miners drag Footsie

17th Jun 2009 11:01

London's top stocks are deep in the red with miners lower and supermarket firm Sainsbury's also down.Vedanta Resources, Kazakhmys, Antofagasta, Xstrata, Eurasian Natural Resource are amongst the major fallers. Sainsbury's is the only non mining stock to perforate the top ten sliders. The supermarket chain is raising £445m via a placing and offering of convertible bonds to speed up growth and take advantage of the weak property market. In a separate statement, the retailer reported a 7.8% hike in like-for-like sales excluding fuel and VAT for the 12 weeks to 13 June.British telecoms group BT is continuing to rise higher. Yesterday it was given a lift by broker comments, today it announced former chief executive of BSkyB Tony Ball has joined the board as a non-executive director.BAE Systems is on the rise after Evolution Securities issued a buy note after meeting the defence firm in the Paris air show.Design and engineering consultancy group WS Atkins saw revenue and profits rise last year and already has half of its budgeted income for the current financial year secured. Revenue in the year to 31 March 2009 rose 13% to £1,487.2m from £1,313.6m a year earlier, while profit before tax climbed 12% to £102.7m from £91.9m.Barclays will recommend the £8.1bn ($13.5bn) purchase of its fund management arm, Barclays Global Investors (BGI), to US asset manager BlackRock at a general meeting in August. Barclays will pay previous bidder CVC fees of $175m (£106m) under the agreement signed with it on 9 April.Bus and train group National Express expects to meet its key covenant of adjusted net debt to EBITDA not exceeding 3.5 times at 30 June and its banks have agreed to retain this covenant at a maximum of 4 times.Camping and short break holiday specialist Holidaybreak is to raise £33.2m through a fully underwritten rights issue. The money will fund an expansion of its education division, where it sees an opportunity to snap up sites from distressed sellers of former independent private schools and commercial conference centres.British American Tobacco (BATs) has bought an 85% stake in Indonesia' fourth largest cigarette maker. The company is paying Rajawali Group $494m (£303m) for the majority stake in PT Bentoel Internasional Investama. Sales have continued to slide at fashion retail chain owner Alexon with little respite expected from the tough retail climate. Like-for-like sales in the 17 weeks to 13 June fell by 10.5% and by 12% including the two weeks hit by snow. Increased promotional activity also meant margins experienced a small negative impact over the period.