LinkedIn Corp’s employees and early backers are said to be ready to sell off more than 6.7 million shares in the social networking firm, so as to benefit from a rapid increase in the company’s market value over the past 6 months.
The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation Pte. Ltd. (GIC), Singapore’s biggest state investor, has sold off nearly all of its shares in troubled Japanese camera and medical device maker Olympus Corp. – becoming the first major shareholder to have dumped its stake in the company amidst an accounting scandal that has seen Olympus’s market value drop by more than $6.5 billion since mid-October.
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has been reportedly accused of asking some of the social gaming company’s early employees to give up their shares, or risk being fired.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story on the company behind popular Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, indicating that Zynga was “leaning on some workers to surrender pre-IPO shares.”
UK’s largest bank HSBC Holdings Plc warned yesterday that the company might be forced to leave the country if the Government decides to adopt all the reforms proposed by the Independent Commission on Banking’s (ICB) in September this year.
HSBC is said to be furious at certain ICB proposals that would penalise the bank for having more deposits than loans – a measure they claim allows the bank to be more liquid and safe than other UK banks.
United Airlines Flight 1403 from Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport will become the first US commercial flight to be powered by an “advanced biofuel” when it takes off at 10:25am CT today.
The 941.5 miles flight from Houston to Chicago will take a Boeing 737-800 Eco-Skies Aircraft and its passengers from the former home city of Continental Airlines to the base of United Airlines, which took over Continental last year to form United Continental Holdings Inc.
Argentinean energy company Bridas Energy Holdings Ltd. has pulled the plug on a US$7.06 billion buyout of BP’s 60 percent stake in Pan American Energy LLC, citing “legal reasons” and “the way BP has behaved during the transaction” as the key reasons behind the failed negotiations.
A second alternative energy company, which received a loan guarantee similar to the one acquired by Solyndra from the same US Department of Energy (DOE) program, has gone bankrupt – barely a year after receiving US government financing to provide green energy jobs and resources for the country.
Beacon Power Corp., a Massachusetts based energy storage company, filed for Chapter 11 proceeding late on Sunday, becoming the second green tech company that had been backed by the US government to become bankrupt in the space of two months.
Japanese electronics giant Panasonic has announced that the company is likely to post an annual net loss of 420 billion yen (US$5.5 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 2012 – with rising restructuring costs for its television and semiconductor businesses, coupled with a weak demand for its products overseas due to a strong yen, to blame for what will be its biggest annual loss in a decade.
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which filed the biggest bankruptcy in US history in September 2008, could now have enough support from its creditors to implement its latest payout plan that would finally allow the company to lift itself out of the doldrums of bankruptcy, said a top Lehman executive on Wednesday.
Swiss Bank UBS AG has reported a better-than-expected third quarter net profit of 1.02 billion Swiss francs (US$1.16 billion) in their quarterly earnings statement on Tuesday, despite taking a 1.849 billion franc loss last month due to a rogue trading scandal.
