Buccleuch Property has secured a £45m refinancing facility with Royal Bank of Scotland. The funding will be used to increase the size of the JPUT from £16m to £60m through 70% gearing. The Duke of Buccleuch’s company has put three properties worth £10m under offer: an office in Windsor, Buckinghamshire, the Robbs department store in Hexham, Northumberland, and an industrial parade in Newmarket, Suffolk.
CLS Holdings is to buy back nearly 8% of its shares, returning £40m to shareholders. The offer to buy 5.9m shares at £6.80 each will be closed by 13 November.
Regeneration specialist Urban Splash made £8.9m profit on revenue of £57.3m for the year to March, almost exactly double the previous year’s figures. Staff costs rose from £2.4m to £3.1m, with the highest paid director getting £191,722. During the year, the company secured £250m of new projects around the country.
Lend Lease chief executive Greg Clarke has come under fire for his A$2.2m (£890,000) bonus for the 2005-06 financial year. The bonus, revealed in the company’s annual report, resulted in a 35% rise in Clarke’s salary package to $8.22m (£3.3m) for a year in which the Australian developer underperformed the broader share market, delivering a total shareholder return of just 11.2%. In comparison, the S&P/ASX 200 index returned 23.7%. Australian Shareholders Association chairman Stephen Matthews said Lend Lease chairman David Crawford should “explain more clearly the reason for the additional $2.2m, which was outside the principles spelt out in the remuneration report”.
