Baugur, an Icelandic investment group, has decided to buy Mappin & Webb, the UK jewellers whose clientele include among others the Queen. The 32-outlet chain of Mappin & Webb (MW) will be merged with the Goldsmiths chain of jewellers which Baugur had bought in May 2004. This consolidated group is expected to become the “leading high-end jeweller” of the UK.

Landsbanki, the Icelandic bank, will advise Baugur in this acquisition deal worth around 20 million pounds. MW Group will be sold by European Acquisition Capital (EAC), the private equity company that owns about 75 per cent of the stake. Nick Evans, the chief executive, along with other senior managers holds the remainder stake.

Baugur and EAC are supposed to have beaten rivals like the American chain Tourneau and private-equity groups to bag this deal. Mappin & Webb was advertised for sale in June this year by its largest investor by private equity group European Acquisition Capital.

According to Companies House, MW Group made an operating profit of £1.6m in the year ending March 2004.

Mappin & Webb was founded in 1774. Its scale of operations is smaller than that of Goldsmiths. Apart from the jewellery chain, it also owns the Watches of Switzerland business and runs the Rolex and Patek Phillippe stores housed on London’s Bond Street along with luxury goods such as Georg Jensen jewellery and Jaeger Le-Coultre watches.

Among its other assets are the grocer Iceland, Hamleys the toy shop. In French Connection, it is the second-largest shareholder. Mappin & Webb is also a silversmith to the Queen and the Prince of Wales.

Baugur is expected to buy a stake of around 40%. The chairman and chief executive of Goldsmiths, Jurek Piasecki, is also said to be investing along with Icelandic investment bank Straumur.

The acquisition will make Baugur a jewellery behemoth with 200 stores churning out an annual turnover of £275m. Baugur is expected to defer its acquisition till the New Year, as it wants Mappin and Webb to concentrate on its Christmas selling.

LONDON: Online casino and poker operators who release advertisements that violate law will be prosecuted. Secretary of state for culture, media and sport Tessa Jowell told the British Casino Association’s annual general meeting that action will be taken if the advertisements break existing laws. She said there will be a crack down on advertisers and publishers who knowingly break the law.

Jowell said subject to consultation, no more applications for certificates of consent to run new casinos will be entertained after April 2006, mainly with a view to avoid proliferation of smaller casinos.

All the online casinos and poker sites operate offshore. These offshore companies take bets from punters in the U.K. but, unlike land-based casinos, are allowed to advertise because they are outside the jurisdiction of British law.

The Gambling Act 2005 has provisions allowing them to operate from Great Britain for the first time.

Jowell said the plan is to disallow gambling firms advertising free entry to online tournaments or indicating the value of prizes. Casinos are allowed to promote their brands, but they cannot offer inducements to gamble. She said she finds that advertisements in newspapers and on London Metro platforms had flouted rules.

The proposed crackdown could act as a further blow to online gaming, which has suffered from lack of investor confidence and falling share prices.

Internet gambling company Partygaming, however, welcomed the action saying it supports such measures. The company’s director John Shepherd said his company is fully compliant with the law, and it is very strict about it.

Jowell said her department, jointly with the regulator Gambling Commission, would send letters to advertisers, publishers and gambling firms, warning them against violating the existing norms. The letter will clarify the legal status on the issue and violators are liable for fines of up to 5000 pounds and jail terms extending up to two years.

There is going to be a tax on properties with scenic views according to reports. The Labour government is proposing to tax homes with sea views, or those located in serene surroundings like hills, mountains, lakes or rivers. Even a golf course in the vicinity would attract the tax.

The additional tax will become applicable to homes with a specified number of rooms than the usual average, with large gardens, roof terraces or balconies. The proposal is expected to be part of a revaluation of each of the properties in England, the first after such a revaluation done 1991. Officials undertaking the groundwork for the revaluation have been instructed to get data on these aspects.

It is understood that deputy prime minister John Prescott’s office has prepared documentation on the proposal. Media reports indicated that the Valuation Office Agency has a “new computer-assisted mass appraisal system” to help officials obtain specific details on every property in England.

MeanWhile, the Conservatives have criticised the plan. Caroline Spelman, Conservative local government spokesman, alleged that the government is preparing a stealth tax on the middle classes. She revealed that the plan has “value significance codes” covering 66 features and the government had spent 45 million pounds on the computer system.

The government had postponed the revaluation, which was due in 2007 to 2010 because it feared a backlash over higher council tax bills. The M.P.s are now discussing plans for the revaluation.

According to the proposal, factors like a sea view will have a bearing if these have a significant influence on the overall value of the property. A swimming pool or tennis court along with views of the sea, hills, mountains, lakes or rivers, may attract the proposed tax, according to sources.

The council tax is now structured on eight bands, with the top-rung H band property holders paying twice as much as people on D band. A study of a revaluation exercise done in Wales last year will suggest that owners of D band property in England may be levied an extra 267 pounds on their bill if they go up one band and 534 pounds if they go up two bands.

The 1991 valuation fixed the value of a D band property at between 68,001 pounds and 88,000 pounds. Homes in other bands get bills, which are proportionately higher or lower.

LONDON – The Government has rejected speculation that consumers looking to sell their homes would have to shell out £1,000 on Home Information Packs. These packs are being introduced in 2007 as a part of the Government’s initiative to change the way a property is brought and sold.

Homeowners will have to put these packs out detailing a professional survey of the property, evidence of ownership and local authority searches before they can sell their home. The Government said that these packs would cost a total of £635 and not £1,000 as is speculated.

Critics say that the introduction of these packs would spawn fake inspectors who would have little knowledge of the property concerned. “Home information packs will be a breeding ground for cowboys, happy to ignore problems or, worse, not qualified to identify them. Most buyers will simply not trust the report of a home inspector paid by the seller and will end up paying for their own survey,” said Liberal Democrat spokesman Sarah Teather.
There are now widespread concerns that no insurance company will want to provide cover for these property inspectors and consumers would be burdened with the legal bills if the inspector’s report were found to be false. “Labour’s sellers’ packs will simply put up the cost of selling a home, create more red tape and ultimately undermine a fragile market,” said Caroline Spelman, a Tory spokeswoman.

But Yvette Cooper, the housing minister defended the introduction of these packs saying that they would save over £1 million each day that consumers spend in surveys, legal fees and searches, “Buying a home is stressful enough without losing hundreds of pounds on legal fees or valuations for properties that then fall through. It is crazy that over £1 million a day is wasted like this. Home Information Packs will save money and cut waste in buying and selling homes.”

LONDON – A former producer of the rap group So Solid Crew has been awarded a life sentence for murdering a love rival. Carl Morgan, 24 shot dead Colin Scarlett after the two got into a wrangle over Morgan’s former girlfriend Elisha McFarlane, who also happens to be the mother of his two children.

Morgan had been troubling McFarlane over her new relationship with Scarlett. Furious with the turn of events Colin Scarlett and two of his cronies looked up Morgan and beat him in front of his sister and his Elisha McFarlane. Morgan felt humiliated and in revenge shot Scarlett near Wandsworth, south London.

“You have taken a young life. You have used firearms in a situation, which is all too familiar, with the inevitable results that many lives have been ruined. Gun use is the scourge of our streets and causes misery and distress. The message must be that it will not be tolerated,” Judge Brian Barker told Morgan at the time of sentencing.

Dwayne Vincent, the band’s lead singer has also been charged with murder, but the jury failed to reach a verdict and consequently he faces retrial next month.

In his defense Morgan said that he did not seek Scarlett to exact revenge, but only wanted to know what they were fighting about, “I wanted to ask him what was this morning about because I didn’t have any problem with him at all. My only concern is the kids,” he told the jury adding that a third unknown gunman had shot Scarlett.

Richard Horwell, prosecuting alleged that Morgan had turned the streets of London violent ones resembling the wild west days, “It was a scene more reminiscent of the Wild West,” said Mr. Horwell.

LONDON: Dominant telecoms company BT Group PLC, yesterday announced it would start a television service by next autumn in a deal with Philips who would make the required set top boxes.

The new service will offer free-to-air television channels picked up via a traditional aerial, which means there will be no TV subscription charges unlike in cable or Sky TV services. It will also provide content on-demand, such as movies as well as a “catch-up” TV service that would provide content from an archive of recent programmes.

These services will be charged for. The installation will include a digital personal video recorder (PVR), with an 80-hour storage capacity. This PVR will be made by Dutch company Philips.

BT’s offering will basically be a broadband connection integrated with a freeview decoder that will pick up digital terrestrial television signal. It will be aimed at the huge market – 12 to 13 million households that are reluctant to take up pay-television.

BT is expected to charge no more than £25 a month – the typical fees for a low-end television package. BT may find it difficult to convince people that what they are selling is actually a form of pay TV.

The “converged TV service” will initially be available only to BT’s 2 million broadband customers.

BT’s planned entry into the television market is seen as a reaction to BskyB’s announcement that it would make a foray into the telecoms market some time next year. Sky had earlier announced its intention to offer a bundled TV-Internet service aiming to get the broadband customers of BT and others.

Until recently, both Sky TV and BT have been working as allies reselling each other’s products to create an offering that will match that of NTL and Telewest. BT terminated this partnership after Sky’s announcement to enter the telecoms market.

Sky TV is yet to announce a launch date for its video-on-demand service.

BT also said that it would not bid again for rights to televise Premier League football matches for which competitor Sky is also a bidder.

LONDON: The BBC World Service is shutting down 10 of its foreign language broadcasts, mostly targeting the Eastern European countries, clearly indicating it is sensitive to the changed post-cold war world scenario. At one time, people in countries in the erstwhile Soviet bloc relied on BBC service for reliable and objective information.

The company also announced that it is launching an Arabic language television news and information service in the Middle East.

BBC’s World Service is broadcast in 43 languages and has a weekly listnership of more than 149 million. The company’s director of World Service Nigel Chapman said the mix of services has to evolve as the world changes.

BBC said the Arabic Television Service will be broadcast 12 hours a day across the Middle East, beginning 2007. It will be freely available through a satellite or cable TV connection. The service has correspondents in practically every Middle East country and the radio broadcasts now draw 12 million listeners each week. It also has an Arabic online service, BBCArabic.com.

The new service, estimated to cost 19 million pounds a year, will be funded by the British foreign office, which is spending 239 million pounds in 2005 for the World Service. The service will be in direct competition with al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based news service.

Chapman said listener figures have fallen steadily in Europe and many of the services being closed were more relevant to the cold war than the current geo-political scenario.

The services to be cancelled are broadcasts in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai. There will be loss of 218 jobs in the language services and 18 in other areas. The Arabic service will create 201 jobs, the company said.

Meanwhile, journalist and broadcasting unions criticised the move, saying it undermined the World Service’s claim to be a truly global operation and ignored evidence that some of the affected countries were far from thriving democracies.

Swedish telecoms equipment major Ericsson has almost finalised a deal to buy out Marconi its UK rival for a sum of £1.2bn ($2.1bn). Following the sale, Marconi’s shareholders will receive 275 pence per share. Earlier, Siemens AG and France’s Alcatel SA had also evinced interest in acquiring Marconi’s telecom arm.

After the sell-out, Marconi will concentrate on its services business and it will be rechristened as Telent Plc. Mike Parton, Marconi’s Chief Executive confessed in August that the company was having talks with unidentified suitors for its possible takeover.

Earlier, it had failed to get into any agreement for a 10 billion-pound contract with its biggest client BT Group Plc. Marconi publicly announced in April that if BT did not select it for its contracts, it would lose out on £50 million.

The buyout, it is opined, will help Ericsson expand its business in the market for converging fixed and mobile communications like IP telephony. It has already established itself as a global leader in sales of mobile equipments to operators the world over.

Chief executive of Ericsson, Carl-Henric Svanberg said: “The acquisition of the Marconi businesses has a compelling strategic logic and is a robust financial case”.

Marconi has 9,000 staff working world over. 2,000 workers of its UK workers will become part of Telent operations.

This deal will see Marconi getting £185 million towards its pension plan. A further £490 million will be kept in an escrow account for the potential benefit of the plan.

Speaking about the deal, Marconi chairman John Devaney said: “Over a period of several years, we have had conversations with a number of potential partners regarding the necessary consolidation in our industry. In Ericsson, we have found a partner that has the scale and global reach to take our equipment business forward in a way that we would not have been able to do alone.”

Marconi’s stock market value is 731 million pounds as of date. Formed 119 years ago, Marconi was suggested by Credit Suisse First Boston’s analysts to split itself and then “sell off the parts.” Marconi hit its rock-bottom when its share value was eroded by half in April after BT overlooked it for its network upgrade.