BGN Entrepreneur

The banks that lent £1.5 billion to Four Seasons, one of Britain’s biggest care home operators, have written off about £800 million in a restructuring deal announced.
Four Seasons, a near-casualty of the credit crisis, has still to refinance £727 million by September next year, including a £600 million bond originally due in September 2008.
RBS, the 84% state-owned bank, is one of the lenders hit hardest by the restructuring deal. It led a consortium of 30 lenders that lent £1.5 billion to Three Delta, an investment vehicle of the Qatari Royal Family, to buy the care homes company in 2006. Those lenders have swapped the debt for a stake in Four Seasons. Because RBS held riskier debt than some of the other lenders, its stake in the company will be worth less than the near-40 percent of the debt it owns.
Three Delta had about £100 million of equity in the business, which it has walked away from. The Qataris were expecting hefty increases in profit at Four Seasons, previously owned by Allianz, which failed to materialize as the Government began to keep more elderly people in their own houses rather than in care homes. The deal will safeguard 20000 jobs at Four Seasons, which runs 330 homes with 16000 beds.

For many people, an ideal world with Search Engine Optimization would be simple, quick and a one-time task to check off a list. However, it is not like that at all. In order to create more value online, organizations need to effectively use various social media for their PR Online.
There are 3 key steps as a primer:
1. Go platform agnostic. Social media is more than just Twitter.
2. Get ready for a long term commitment. Using Social Media for PR requires dedicated work.
3. Don’t forget the SEO intersection. Find the nexus of PR, Social Media and SEO and use a keyword glossary across all marketing.

A handful of senior traders in a RBS joint venture are set to share a bonus pool of more than $40 million this year.
Details of the payments are likely to provoke new anger about pay in the financial sector. The Government has been trying desperately to prevent a possible bumper bonus round this year and may use today’s Pre-Budget Report to announce a tax on bonuses.
Rumors swept the market that traders were the market that traders were aggressively short-selling the bank’s stock amid fears of a punitive bonuses tax, which could lead to an exodus of investment bankers from the state0controlled RBS.
Managing directors in RBS Sempra Commodities, which is based in the US, may receive about $5 million each this year. The majority of its traders are based in Stamford, Connecticut. Last year the business paid out $614 million in staff costs. For the nine months from when it was set up on April 1 until December 31 it made pre-tax profits of $691 million on revenues of $1.4 billion.
According to accounts filed at Companies House, key management at RBS Sempra Commodities shared $46 million in 2008. The group is thought to include between ten and 20 people out of its 1000 employees.
RBS Sempra Commodities is among the businesses that the bank must sell as part of its state aid settlement with the European Commission. The Government is particularly keen for RBS to offload the business due to its large exposure to high-risk commodities trading and due to the huge bonuses it paid out last year.
The situation echoes Citigroup’s sale of Phibro, its energy-trading business, to avoid a showdown with the US Government over a proposed $100 million pay package for Andrew Hall, the Phibro chief executive. Citigroup received $45 billion in emergence funding from the US Government to keep it afloat after the credit crunch.
The bonus pool for RBS Sempra Commodities is in addition to the £1 billion pot the Edinburgh-based bank has reserved for bonuses in its main business this year.

Critical Illness Cover is an insurance specially designed to help people cope financially if they are diagnosed with a critical illness. For clear reasons, critical-illness insurance will be a taboo subject. Not many people want to know or plan in such a moment, any talk about people’s destructive life, and then again, the fact is that the majority of people in the UK, the family members have no doubt that they will find it difficult to cope with the members of the economic When the unity of the family, always a serious life-threatening diseases to open action.
Standards of people think that their relations will be all the dead, if their rights. This, unfortunately, is not the case, especially if you have any old relatives or descendants. Have your way to rest, to ensure the greatest help is to give your loved ones may get an insurance coverage of major diseases. Compensate for this cover type is an asset, you died, or decrease in critical condition.
If you only know that you plan to cover the different types of measures on the market in those days. A life insurance plan, you give a fixed time for security, whether the documents and arrangements for insurance policyholders. To view the coverage map does not include the fact that you are usually on a monthly basis for deposit to the insurance company. You as a policy owner will receive it in return is a sum of money, beloved party, when you play drums in the insurance period.
The cost of the scheme, because they usually jump on the political person’s age. In other terms, older people, the more likely to move more money than they had a juvenile offense is greater than one. This is not a factor, dynamics, etc., in addition, the overall health of their work can also be effective.
Life insurance plans, at present the majority of the owners to pay, and when a fatal disease or uncertain diagnosis. This is obviously an additional cost, and often referred to as life and critical-illness insurance; well known.
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Follow these words of wisdom to have the best Christmas ever, without spending January payingfor it.

1. Plan everything well ahead.
Unless you hire a hermitage or move to one of the few countries where the festive season is not celebrated, the Christmas period can be very costly. It is true that an annual holiday is generally more expensive, but the big difference is that you save and plan for it all year, with many of the major costs paid well in advance.
So why not do the same with Christmas? Start by listing what you did in 2008 and what it all cost. That will give you a simple template for 2009. Then ask yourself if you want to have a similar sort of Christmas or something different? Did you overspend on some things, but under spend on other? Spontaneity is fine if you have very deep pockets, otherwise, set a plan and a budget so you stay in control.

2. Set up a special savings account
You may not earn much interest between now and Christmas, but you will have a cash cushion if you put away a set amount for October, November, and December through a direct debit from your bank account. And no, October is not too late to start saving. Doing it this way will certainly be less painful than trying to buy everything with your December salary. Next year, start in January with smaller amounts and that will make covering Christmas a breeze.

3. Make present pacts
Hands up if you’re prone to gift bidding wars? Perhaps you believe that your partner is going to spend £200 on your present, in turn, you feel obliged to spend at least that , and perhaps £50 more, leading your partner to out-trump you with £300. And so it goes on, before you’ve actually even bought anything.
Often, the pricier the gift, the easier it is to get wrong. Witness the returns queue at top stores just after Christmas.
So agree a spending limit with other adults and stick to it. You’ll be just as happy with something modest and the peace of mind that you’ve not forced your family into overspending.

4. Check your debts
Try to pay off short-term debts, such as overdrafts and credit card bills, over the next few months to give yourself a clean financial slate for Christmas.
Leaving your plastic at home to avoid temptation is a good start for many. This way you will have some credit or an overdraft facility available if you do overspend at Christmas, and paying this off in 2010 will be less painful than if you are still saddled with what you owe from 2009.

5. Go shopping with cash
A cash-only discipline should also prevent you from buying items on a whim—usually things that no-one really wants and will end up, perhaps embarrassingly, in the charity shop come January. Better still, do some web research on exactly what you want to buy for everyone, and hit the shops armed with a list, repeating the mantra ‘I must not deviate from the list’.

6. Sort out Christmas lunch early
And don’t forget how much entertaining on the day itself can cost. If a big Christmas lunch for family and friends is on the menu, work out now who is going to host it and how everyone else can contribute. Starters and puddings generally travel well, so ask other guests to bring a dish. It means less stress and cooking for the host on the day, and everyone shares the cost.
If you’re particularly brave, you could leave buying a turkey until late afternoon on Christmas Eve, when pries at supermarkets tend to tumble. But only do this if you have a Plan B in the freezer!

7. Leave shopping to the last minutes
Big stores often start sales in the week before Christmas to encourage spending. So you can pick up some real bargains, especially on fashion, music and films. However, if you are buying in the sales, check the returns policy on anything you purchase, and as the Christmas Eve shopping hours draw to a close beware of panic buying, you’ll only end up with overpriced and unwanted items. And remember to take that list with you.

Businesses are always looking for ways to make their customers feel part of their brand, and Firefly Tonics have found an innovative way of doing it.
The business is known for its distinctive bright bottles adorned with quirky photos. Less well-known is that the photos are all taken by Firefly customers, who send in their best snaps. Each month the best pictures are used on the bottles, with winners receiving a crate of drinks.
Firefly founders, Marcus Waley-Cohen and Harry Briggs, say the process involves customers with the brand, creating a tight sense of belonging.

Online traders are bullish about their sales and profits in the run-up to Christmas, a survey by eBay has found.
More than half of the 500 companies polled said that they had ordered more stock than this time last year. Only 16pc expected to see sales down on last year.
With Christmas accounting for almost a fifth of annual sales for the average online retailer, the turnaround in confidence since the start of the year is marked. More than two-thirds of online businesses expect sales to rise, compared with only half in January. The number expecting sales to fall has almost halved.
The companies also report that they think that pressure on their profit margins has also eased, with the percentage expecting to maintain or grow their margins increasing from just under two-thirds in January to more than three-quarters in September.