By Michael Casey, ASSOCIATED PRESS, 8:19 a.m. June 27, 2005 - CALANG, Indonesia –
Mike Gray spends most days as Rolls-Royce’s regional director selling jet engines to the Indonesian military or compression systems to oil companies across the country’s vast archipelago. But since the tsunami, the 54-year-old Briton with a boyish face has assumed a new role: spurring corporate relief efforts. He then approached the London-based bank HSBC Holdings with a proposal to build a $500,000 clinic in the coastal town of Calang. “When he said half a million dollars, I almost gasped,” said Richard McHowat, the bank’s chief in Indonesia. “I said, ‘Mike, we’re going to struggle to put that kind of money together.’” The state-of-the-art primary care clinic was completed nine weeks later.
Archive for » June, 2005 «
BEIJING, June 27 — Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., Japan’s third-largest bank, aims to expand lending to overseas companies in China this year, challenging
HSBC Holdings Plc. and Citigroup Inc. in the world’s fastest-growing major economy. Sumitomo Mitsui wanted half its loan growth in China to come from non-Japanese clients in the year to March 31, from 40 percent last year when it boosted lending in that country by 71 percent, said Yuichi Hirano, senior vice president of international banking.
Another interesting fact - although HSBC gave £1m towards the Tsaunami appeal they were still charging UK (and elsewhere?) relatives £25 a transaction to wire money out to affected relatives right up and till a memo went out to branch staff on January 14th, 2005 to stop the practice following a customer complaint.
Here’s a secret two of the nation’s largest consumer-electronics chains don’t want investors to know. As TVs, portable DVD players, and other stuff fly off their shelves, Best Buy Co. (BBY ) and Circuit City Inc. (CC ) aren’t banking on them to rake in the profits. Instead, they’re counting on the extended warranty contracts that they sell aggressively along with the goods. Warranties cost virtually nothing to market, and the products they insure rarely need repairs. Says FTN Midwest Securities Corp. analyst Daryl Boehringer: “It’s just pure profit flowing down to the bottom line.”
Mon Jun 20, 2005 06:48 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge refused on Monday to grant a temporary restraining order that would have stopped New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer from investigating large U.S. banks for their lending practices to minorities.
The order was sought by The Clearing House Association of 11 banks and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which are suing Spitzer’s office on grounds that states do not have jurisdiction over national banks.
