Good morning. Here is your AM bulletin with the latest news and views from EG, along with a few interesting stories from the national press.
Blackstone has passed the $1tn AUM milestone – by a cool £1.4bn – but sees a “vast opportunity for further expansion”. And it isn’t the slightest bit daunted by distributable earnings falling by 39%.
But where, asks The FT (£), will it seek its next trillion dollars?
Meanwhile, CVC has raised €26bn from investors for a new buyout fund, beating the record previously held by Blackstone.
And King Charles has taken a major pay cut from his share of Crown Estate profit. He will now get just 12%, instead of 25%, to avoid being handed a massive windfall, thanks largely to the auction of wind farm rights. But despite this, his income will still go up by £40m in two years, thanks to the Crown Estate’s predicted £1bn profit.
But Sweden’s state energy company, Vattenfall, has just abandoned work on its multi-billion-pound wind farm off the coast of Norfolk.
“Nonsensical… utterly pathetic.” Marks & Spencer’s boss Stuart Machin has lashed out at Michael Gove, after the levelling up secretary went against his planning inspector’s advice to reject its Oxford Street plans – “on the whim of one man”.
It is all part of what The FT (£) calls the “embodied carbon conundrum”.
In other news, the charity which owns a 150-acre business park on the site of the former Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, will go to the market this summer to seek more than £20m finance for the next 200,000 sq ft phase of development. Stay tuned to EG later today for a cracking long read on that.
And we could be on the brink of something big for life sciences, writes British Land’s head of workspace leasing, innovation and life sciences, Michael Wiseman. But it is critical that the industry meets the need for scale-up space.
Virgin Money is to close 39 branches – about a third of its network – as it shifts business online.
And Vistry‘s completions have fallen by 22% over the first six months of the year.
Meanwhile, a London mansion linked to Russian property investor Andrey Goncharenko has been sold to Indian billionaire Ravi Ruia for £113m in an off-market deal.
