Sunday newspaper round-up: Arriva, Goldman Sachs, Barclays

18th Apr 2010 14:11

Deutsche Bahn, Germany's state owned transport group, is getting ready to wheel out an agreed £1.6bn bid for Britain's bus and rail group, Arriva, according to the Sunday Times. City sources expect it to table an offer of between 750p and 775p a share, valuing Arriva at £1.6bn. Elsewhere in the transport sector, the Independent on Sunday says that Network Rail members are plotting to block Janis Kong's appointment as a non-executive director in protest at her association with the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) at the time the bank went off the rails and had to be bailed out by the UK government. Kong was an RBS non-executive director during the ill-fated period when Sir Fred Goodwin headed the bank. A spokesman for Network Rail said that most of the feedback on Kong's appointment had been positive but that it was expected that "a number of members would object on point of principle."Barclays Capital, the investment banking arm of Barclays, is looking to build in the success of its Lehman Brothers acquisition and establish itself as a top three global player in the next five years, according to the Sunday Telegraph. "2009 was about building Europe and Japan, and that is largely done," claims Dixit Joshi, Barclays Capital's head of equities across Europe and the Middle and Far East. "The mission this year is about building non-Japan Asia and that will go on until 2011," he added.Staying on the subject of investment banking, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has launched an investigation into the London operations of Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs, after claims that the bank masterminded a $1bn fraud against investors.The Sunday Times reports that the FSA is helping its American counterpart, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with its enquiries. The SEC took action against the bank in a New York court on Friday.YouTube, the online video site owned by search engine giant Google, is targeting the $450bn television advertising market, the Sunday Telegraph reports. At present the typical YouTube user currently watches 10-15 minutes of film per day on the site compared to five hours of television viewing, but with Internet capability becoming a more frequent feature of television sets, the borders between the two media will become blurred, YouTube's management asserts. "It's hard for me to imagine that in five to 10 years from now most of the content we consume won't be delivered over the Internet," said Salar Kamangar, vice president of product management for YouTube. "Once the number of minutes is large enough that brings along with it a whole new set of revenue opportunities such as the future of the way people buy TV ads, the ads purchasing process, the way you track it and report it," Kamangar said.Plans by Indian oil and power company Essar Energy to float in London have hit a snag, with leading fund managers claiming that the company's advisers are pitching the offer price too high, the Independent on Sunday reports. The paper says that the company is looking to raise £2.5bn from the sale of between one-fifth and one-quarter of the company's shares. "We are talking about a cut of 20 per cent before we get interested," one fund manager was quoted as saying.